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(Re)Claiming America: Ortiz's After and Before the Lightning

(Re)Claiming America: Ortiz's After and Before the Lightning (Re)Claiming America Ortiz's After and Before the Lightning robin riley fast In After and Before the Lightning (1994), Acoma Pueblo writer Simon J. Ortiz recounts his struggles to find himself at home on the northern plains during a winter with the Lakota of the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota. He records and reflects on his confrontations with extreme cold, with a harsh landscape that challenges Indians and whites alike, with the consequences of colonization, with an America that is both his and alien. In his preface, Ortiz describes the process of writing this book as "putting together a map of where I was in the cosmos" (xiv); it is a cosmos persistently marked by extremes, of weather, landscape, and emotion, a cosmos often characterized by imagery of edges and margins, in which safety is always an issue. Safety is an issue, too, because this cosmos pointedly includes America, with its history of genocidal politics and multiple oppressions, a place that Ortiz claims, and a history that he insists his readers recognize. Ortiz dialogically engages with a particular place and climate, with himself and others, and with America--the social-culturaleconomic-political entity that he both claims and criticizes. The book's dialogism http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Studies in American Indian Literatures University of Nebraska Press

(Re)Claiming America: Ortiz's After and Before the Lightning

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Publisher
University of Nebraska Press
Copyright
Copyright © 2005 by Robin Riley Fast.
ISSN
1548-9590
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

(Re)Claiming America Ortiz's After and Before the Lightning robin riley fast In After and Before the Lightning (1994), Acoma Pueblo writer Simon J. Ortiz recounts his struggles to find himself at home on the northern plains during a winter with the Lakota of the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota. He records and reflects on his confrontations with extreme cold, with a harsh landscape that challenges Indians and whites alike, with the consequences of colonization, with an America that is both his and alien. In his preface, Ortiz describes the process of writing this book as "putting together a map of where I was in the cosmos" (xiv); it is a cosmos persistently marked by extremes, of weather, landscape, and emotion, a cosmos often characterized by imagery of edges and margins, in which safety is always an issue. Safety is an issue, too, because this cosmos pointedly includes America, with its history of genocidal politics and multiple oppressions, a place that Ortiz claims, and a history that he insists his readers recognize. Ortiz dialogically engages with a particular place and climate, with himself and others, and with America--the social-culturaleconomic-political entity that he both claims and criticizes. The book's dialogism

Journal

Studies in American Indian LiteraturesUniversity of Nebraska Press

Published: Nov 28, 2005

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