Review: Toward a Native American Critical Theory

Toward a Native American Critical Theory #

By Elvira Pulitano

University of Nebraska Press, 2003

Pulitano, Elvira. Toward a Native American Critical Theory. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003. ISBN 9781496245311.

The premise is straightforward and, in 2003, needed saying. Against the recurring complaint that Native American studies harbors a "resistance to theory," Elvira Pulitano argues that a Native critical theory already exists, has existed for some time, and can be read as a coherent body of work. Her evidence is the criticism written by six Native scholars: Paula Gunn Allen, Robert Allen Warrior, Craig Womack, Greg Sarris, Louis Owens, and Gerald Vizenor. Her claim is that these writers neither import Western theory nor refuse it; they build something hybrid, dialogic, and generative by pressing oral-tradition epistemology against poststructuralism, postcolonial critique, and Bakhtin, and the result is not a compromise but a method. In this review, I will argue that Pulitano's map remains genuinely useful, but that the map conceals a ranking; the book presents itself as a survey while functioning as a verdict, and the critics it judged answered back at book length.

The architecture and the argument #

Four chapters pair the critics by approach. Allen gets the first, read through her gynocentric criticism and the woman-centered cosmology that organizes it. Warrior and Womack share the second, where intellectual sovereignty and Red Stick theory represent the nationalist position. Sarris and Owens share the third as practitioners of a crosscultural, dialogic reading. Vizenor gets the fourth alone, which is the right call given how much of trickster hermeneutics and survivance resists pairing with anything.

The method is close reading of criticism as if it were literature, and this move is the book's most productive. Pulitano treats theoretical prose as a rhetorical performance with its own narrative strategies rather than as a set of positions to be summarized. She reads these critics against Bhabha, Gates, Spivak, Krupat, and Anzaldúa, and the comparison genuinely illuminates when the terms line up. The recurring conclusion is that a pure, uncontaminated Native discourse is not available and never was, because the critical languages in play have been entangled for centuries.

That conclusion is also the problem.

The ranking underneath the map #

Pulitano presents the book as a survey, and it functions as an argument. The hybrid and dialogic critics come out ahead; the nationalist critics come out behind. She does not hide this slope so much as defer it, stating her preference late enough that a reader is well into the book before realizing the map tilts.

Jace Weaver, reviewing the book in the American Indian Culture and Research Journal in 2004, put the charge plainly: Pulitano claims a descriptive project while operating as arbiter of the worthy. He praised her erudition and her clarity, and judged her strongest on Vizenor and Owens, which seems right to me. But he argued that the selection of critics does silent work, noting the absence of Elizabeth Cook-Lynn and Taiaiake Alfred and observing (with what I take to be some wryness) that he himself is handled in a footnote. His sharpest point is that Pulitano charges the nationalists with romanticism while running a romanticism of her own, treating mixedblood positionality as the privileged critical vantage and implying that Western training somehow thins out a Native scholar's Nativeness. He also rejected the premise that separatism and theoretical sophistication are at odds, framing the choice of critical tools as a matter of Native intellectual autonomy rather than a deficiency to be diagnosed.

The response did not stop at reviews. Weaver, Womack, and Warrior wrote American Indian Literary Nationalism (University of New Mexico Press, 2006) partly in reply, with a foreword by Simon Ortiz and an afterword by Lisa Brooks. When three of the critics a book analyzes publish a joint volume disputing how they were represented, that response is a significant fact about the book, and any honest assessment has to carry it.

Worth noting on the other side: Womack himself later credited Pulitano with refusing to treat Native writers as sacred cows, and Pulitano has since argued that nationalism and cosmopolitanism complement rather than exclude each other. The debate cooled into something more interesting than the initial exchange suggested.

What it is good for #

Pulitano's real contribution is definitional. She established that Native critical theory can be studied as a genre with its own internal debates, lineages, and formal habits, and she did it at a moment when the field was still being told it had no theory to speak of. The chapter on Vizenor is the best short account of trickster hermeneutics as a critical practice that I know from this period. Her comparative apparatus, whatever its blind spots, gave graduate students a way into a literature that can look forbidding from outside.

The limitations are the ones Weaver named, plus one he did not stress. The book is a study of six critics that reads at times like a verdict on a field, and its non-Native author acknowledges the awkwardness of her position without letting the acknowledgment change the analysis. Naming a difficulty is not the same as addressing it; the acknowledgment functions as ritual rather than method.

Verdict #

Read it, but read it as one side of an argument rather than a settled account. Its taxonomy remains useful, its close readings are often excellent, and its evaluative thumb on the scale is now well documented. Anyone teaching Native literary theory should assign it next to American Indian Literary Nationalism and let students watch the disagreement work. That pairing instructs better than either book alone, and it makes visible the stakes that Pulitano's calm survey prose tends to smooth over.