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The dissertation describes an Indigenous dream framework that underscores the significance of dreams as a mirror of trauma and a way that leads back to Indigenous knowledges. Significant differences of Western and Indigenous epistemology are exemplified by juxtaposing Western and Indigenous dream discourses. The selected prose fiction allows for a dream categorization that emphasizes the significance and meaning of dreams as a metaphorical as well as narrative device.
Nightmares/Anxiety dreams are often the result of the devastating effects of colonization and especially Residential School. Nightmares in the texts are often exact replicas of the abuse suffered in the boarding schools. They are discussed in the context of Robert Arthur Alexie’s novel Porcupines and China Dolls (2001/2009) represents dreams and traumatic nightmares and deals with the fictional Blue People First Nation. The community’s collective intergenerational trauma of Residential School experience keeps them stuck in dysfunctional dynamics dominated by suicides, sexual and physical abuse, drug and sex addictions.
Telling dreams, categorized as “instructing dreams,” and “announcing dreams,” teach the dreamer what will happen in the future. They are discussed in the context of Richard Van Camp’s short stories “On the Wings of this Prayer” and “The Fleshing” (Godless but Loyal to Heaven, 2012), which represent the category of the ecological nightmare as well as of telling dreams. Ecological nightmares display environmentally destructive effects of capitalist globalization that have come to “infect” the world. The Windigo figure in the stories serves as a manifestation of resource and in particular petro-capitalism and Western society’s constant need to subjugate nature. Ecological dreams hence call for ecological vigilance and establish Indigenous knowledges as a source of resurgence and restoration.
Existential dreams function as decolonizing tools that facilitate liberation. The thesis provides a literary analysis of Richard Wagamese’ novel Ragged Company (2008) and Cherie Dimaline’s short story “room 414” (Red Rooms, 2007) where homelessness is postulated as the manifestation of individual and tribal/communal disjointedness and isolation. Through existential dreaming, the urban lives of most of the characters dwelling in the shadows and margins of society are existentially transformed and healing seems possible. Paternalistic colonial mindsets continue to patronize Indigenous knowledges (as unreliable and unscientific) until Western “discoveries” prove what has been known for decades.
The thesis underscores dreams as an essential part of Indigenous Knowledges, i.e. as knowledge sources. Surmounting Western dream perceptions and instead valorizing Indigenous knowledges, the characters in the texts discussed in my thesis, unremittingly follow their dreams’ instruction and eventually achieve reconciliation and healing. In the fictional texts discussed, nightmares represent homelessness, trauma, stagnation, and a disconnection to one’s (Native) background, whereas dreams represent continuity through the restoration of identity, finding home, and a sense of belonging. The notion of a dream reality and a waking reality influencing and informing each other relies on sharing dreams with the community, eventually leading to an enactment of the dream or vision. Dreaming and identity are significantly linked and foster processes of intellectual self-determination. The characters’ inability to externalize their internal wishes, desires, and needs results in further denial and consequential bitterness that feed into the spiral of alcohol and drug abuse as well as metaphorical and literal homelessness. The dreams’ semantic field strongly alludes to ceremonial traditions and provides the prospect of a rooted Indigeneity. At the turning points in the lives of the characters, when dreams and visions start to appear, they are lost in translation. The characters’ own illiteracy towards Native epistemology and spirituality has them trapped in the inability to read and act on their dream messages. Strong (often female) Indigenous presences that go hand in hand with the appearance of dreams provide the protagonists with guidance and lead the way back to the “Old Ways.” Through dreaming, the spiral of colonialism is disrupted and replaced by the circle of reconciliation and relationality.
1. "Sole or Whole" – Quilting the Racialized Subject Calgary feminist and scholar Aruna Srivastava tackles the complex question of what it means to be "mixed-race/mixedblood/halfbreed/mestizo/hybrid/hyphenated?" in her editorial to Hyphe Nation (1996). In response to her question, this study of contemporary African-Canadian literature suggests that mixed-race Canadians are often constructed as the Other in Canadian society. In consequence, constructions of "racial hybridity" in African-Canadian literature usually aim at carving out a space that doesnt marginalize "racial" mixing but eviscerates restrictive Manichean constructions of identity in order to promulgate concepts of wholeness and self-definition. In consequence, African-Canadian mixed-race writers create hybrid identities that are infinite, multilayered, fragmented and yet whole. They reflect the processes of shifting, overlapping and re-creation in the process of creating identity and can hence be read as representations of complex, de-central, non-hierarchical identities. They are quilting multidimensional racialized subjects. 2. Signifying the In-Between: "Race", "Racial Hybridity" and Questions of Belonging "Race" is not a biological category. Rather it represents a social construction predicated upon the interpretation of difference. It was designed to establish, justify or perpetuate hegemonic social structures and is adherent to the principle of white supremacy. Contemporary "race" theory often neglects the experiences of racially mixed individuals because it fails to offer flexible models of identity in which bi- and multiracial people find themselves represented. This thesis argues in favor of a poetics of difference that accepts and recognizes the heterogeneity of subjectivities while taking into consideration the various dimensions of class, gender, sexuality and ethnicity. Accordingly, constructions of racial hybridity in contemporary African-Canadian literature demonstrate that racism must be acknowledged as an ideology in which people believe and upon which people act. Thus identities often bear the stamp of various histories of resistance and domination, while tackling the question of belonging and re-defining Canadianness. 3. African-Canadian Borderlands References to interracial contacts and the existence of bi- and multiracial people have been omitted from the official founding narratives of the Canadian nation. African-Canadian writers have therefore been successful chroniclers of the past and filled blanks in Canadian historiography in order to shed light on hitherto repressed or erased knowledge. Part of this process is also the inscription of the mixed-race experience into Canadas past. Along this line, bi- and multiracial Canadians often criticize that the state-proclaimed policy of multiculturalism fails to take their manifold racial and ethnic subjectivities into account. 4. "From Sole to Whole" – African-Canadian Mixed-Race Poetics Mixed-race characters in US-American literature often appear in the literary motif of the "tragic mulatto" and it is often implicitly suggested that the bi- or multiracial protagonist is categorized as black. In contrast, African-Canadian constructions of racial hybridity less frequently adhere to the stereotype of the "tragic mulatto" and leave more space for employing alternative modes of racial and ethnic identification. Canadian writers of mixed descent have created a mixed-race poetics that calls attention to contexts, relationships, intersections and wholes. They encourage sites of inclusiveness, incessant shifting and discontinuity in the process of constructing identities. Nevertheless, modes of identification among racially hybrid writers in Canada vary, ranging from detesting whiteness to claiming a Black Nationalist stance. In general, however, they support the idea of fluid and flexible identities. The answer to the initial question of Srivastava is hence given by a vast variety of African-Canadian subject positions. An essentially "black" or "racially mixed" Canadian subject does not exist. Instead, constructions of racial hybridity in African-Canadian literature offer a holistic view of identity and aim at re-conceptualizing the various senses of self and community in Canada. This strategy provides a significant means of self-empowerment and self-reclamation – making racially mixed African-Canadians "whole" instead of "sole".