Between vulnerability and resistance: Rhetorical strategies in Indigenous Canadian nonfiction. (September 2021)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Horakova, Martina
• Other Names: Darias-Beautell Eva guest-editor.
• Is Part Of: Journal of Commonwealth literature. Volume 56:Number 3(2021)
• Page Start: 390
• Page End: 403
• Publication Date: 2021-09
• Subjects: Judith Butler -- Canadian literature -- Henry Kreisel Lecture series -- Tomson Highway -- Indigenous nonfiction -- resistance -- Eden Robinson -- vulnerability; English literature -- Periodicals; Commonwealth literature (English) -- Periodicals; Littérature anglaise -- Périodiques; 820.05
• DOI: 10.1177/0021989420975049
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0021-9894

Abstract

This article explores two Henry Kreisel lectures by Indigenous authors, Eden Robinson's The Sasquatch At Home: Traditional Protocols & Modern Storytelling (2010, published 2011) and Tomson Highway's A Tale of Monstrous Extravagance: Imagining Multilingualism (2014, published 2015), to demonstrate how Indigenous nonfiction employs complex rhetorical strategies in order to engage cross-cultural readers and address crucial issues related to contemporary Indigeneity. Both narratives are claimed to convey a fragile balance between cultural loss and cultural survival — a negotiation which is related theoretically to Judith Butler's notions of vulnerability, precarity, and resistance, particularly to her premise that vulnerability and resistance do not have to be opposed and/or mutually exclusive but rather work in intricate relationships. The article shows that while Robinson (Haisla/Heiltsuk) combines family stories with ethnography to bear witness to both the precarity and resilience of Haisla cultural and ecological survival, Highway (Cree) presents a multimodal and multilingual performance to unsettle his audience through combining humor and confrontation. I ultimately argue that, if Indigenous writing has always expressed this duality of exposing vulnerability as well as inscribing resistance, then, it may serve as a model for transcending the binary structure powerful/powerless, a move that Butler sees as fundamental to her redefinition of vulnerability. In other words, through this optic the history of Indigenous writing is indeed a history of exploring the ways in which vulnerability and resistance relate and interweave, rather than stand in opposition.