Metropolitanism, Genre Blending and Irony: Sherman Alexie’s Poetics of Resistance

Abstract

This paper conducts a textual analysis of Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Ten Little Indians, and The Summer of Black Widows to establish that Alexie disrupts discourses of both Eurocentricism and Native American tribalism through his art. Native American Literature is often studied in contexts of tribalism and modernity, but this paper showcases that Alexis blends the seemingly antagonistic demands of primitivism and modernization. He transports Native American subject from reservations to metropolitan settings and presents that actual Indian existence problematizes the textual stereotypes of ‘manifest destiny’ and ‘vanishing Indian’. Alexie’s art appears as resistance against every form of separatism that perpetuates the binary of superior white and inferior Indian subjects. He foregrounds tribe conscious metropolitanism as the viable mode of Indian survival, blends genres to articulate his dynamic vision, and employs irony to highlight the paradoxes of Native American existence.