- Journal of American Studies Turkey
- Issue: 54
- Edward Dorn’s Idea of the Native American and His "Curious Paleface" Consciousness in The ...
Edward Dorn’s Idea of the Native American and His "Curious Paleface" Consciousness in The Shoshoneans
Authors : Özge Özbek Akiman
Pages : 59-78
View : 9 | Download : 4
Publication Date : 2020-11-01
Article Type : Research
Abstract :In the field of Native American Studies, the politics of representation and research was recognized as late as the 1970s, as a result of the countercultural challenge of the 1960s. Belonging to that moment of challenge and change, Edward Dorn’s photo-essay or documentary prose The Shoshoneans: The People of the Basin Plateau (1966) is an early example for critical understandings of race, culture and subjectivity from a geo-historical perspective. The text also testifies to the poet’s quest for cultural origins and claimed ancestors, defining himself as "a curious paleface.” Its dialogic structure allows a space for the African American photographer Leroy Lucas’ visual language and Native American activist Clyde Warrior’s civic demands. Observing the Western American geography as a colonized space, a "No Where,” and its inhabitants reduced to day-to-day existence, evading the police, Dorn contemplates his relation to his government, to the Shoshone and registers his otherness. A forgotten text, until the publication of its expanded edition in 2013, Dorn’s Shoshoneans remains a geo-historical examination of subjectivity and otherness, presenting a dialogic understanding of the idea of the Native American.Keywords : Edward Dorn, The Shohoneans, otherness, subjectivity