MEDS 261 - Indigenous Book Histories

Semester Offered: Fall
0.5 unit(s)

(Same as ANAS 261 and ENGL 261) This course introduces students to the study of books as physical objects, focusing on the field-transforming interventions of Indigenous studies and the cultural productions of Native peoples in colonial America and the nineteenth-century U.S. Meeting once a week for six weeks, we examine primary sources and critical scholarship that allow us to consider 1) various material textualities of Indigenous expression, within and beyond alphabetic literacy and print, and 2) alternative models of authorship that disrupt what scholar Robert Warrior describes as “the fetishization of single-author works.” Throughout, we interrogate archival power structures and erasures, using recent criticism that conceives methods for tracing in the archives Indigenous agency and survivance. The texts we study may include birchbark books, poems, painted baskets, traditional creation narratives, personal narratives, execution sermons, hymns, treaties, and receipts, along with scholarship by Drew Lopenzina, Phillip Round, and Kelly Wisecup, among others. Blevin Shelnutt.

First six-week course.

One 2-hour period.

Course Format: INT