Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- Chapter One Capitalism, Imperialism, Race and Ethnicity, the Repressive State and the Ideological State Apparatuses, and the Formation of Modern America
- Chapter Two Counterformations to Capitalism, Imperialism, Modern America and Its Repressive State and Ideological State Apparatuses, and the Formation of Modern American Literature, Art, and Culture
- Chapter Three Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt: An Ethnographic Look at the Middle-Class, Individuated Subject in America in the 1920s
- Chapter Four Nick Carraway's Complicated Retreat from Modernity and the Construction of the Modern Gatsby in Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby
- Chapter Five The African American Subaltern, Rearticulated African American Folklore, Modernity, and Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God
- Chapter Six Trickster Narrator, Multinarrative Perspectives, and D'Arcy McNickle's The Surrounded
- Chapter Seven Intersectionality, Inoperative Community, Trauma, Social Justice, and Agnes Smedley's Daughter of Earth
- Chapter Eight Theosophy, Plural Subjectivity, and Djuna Barnes's Nightwood
- Chapter Nine Exile, Cosmopolitanism, Modernity, and Younghill Kang's East Goes West
- Chapter Ten Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter Six - Trickster Narrator, Multinarrative Perspectives, and D'Arcy McNickle's The Surrounded
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 January 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- Chapter One Capitalism, Imperialism, Race and Ethnicity, the Repressive State and the Ideological State Apparatuses, and the Formation of Modern America
- Chapter Two Counterformations to Capitalism, Imperialism, Modern America and Its Repressive State and Ideological State Apparatuses, and the Formation of Modern American Literature, Art, and Culture
- Chapter Three Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt: An Ethnographic Look at the Middle-Class, Individuated Subject in America in the 1920s
- Chapter Four Nick Carraway's Complicated Retreat from Modernity and the Construction of the Modern Gatsby in Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby
- Chapter Five The African American Subaltern, Rearticulated African American Folklore, Modernity, and Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God
- Chapter Six Trickster Narrator, Multinarrative Perspectives, and D'Arcy McNickle's The Surrounded
- Chapter Seven Intersectionality, Inoperative Community, Trauma, Social Justice, and Agnes Smedley's Daughter of Earth
- Chapter Eight Theosophy, Plural Subjectivity, and Djuna Barnes's Nightwood
- Chapter Nine Exile, Cosmopolitanism, Modernity, and Younghill Kang's East Goes West
- Chapter Ten Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
William D‘Arcy McNickle was born to an American Indian (Metis) mother, Philomene, and a Euro- American father on the Flathead Reservation in northern Montana, in 1904, just eight years after F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1896. Although his maternal ancestry extends generations in this country, McNickle, unlike Fitzgerald who was born a US citizen, was not legally made a US citizen until June 2, 1924 when the US Congress enacted the Indian Citizenship Act, which granted citizenship to all American Indians born in the United States. Although the US government through its various repressive local and federal apparatuses had been trying since the 1790s to physically kill off/ eliminate the American Indian, it was only after the Settlers Wars in the 1890s that the US government through the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887 moved to assimilate the American Indian into Euro- American culture and society, to make him a part of the Western enlightenment narrative. The US government outlawed the practice of traditional Native religious ceremonies and established government- run, military- styled boarding and day schools, which American Indian children were required by law to attend. In these schools, the children were forced to speak only English, study standard American subjects/ curricula, attend Christian church, and abandon traditional customs, dress, languages, and religions. The objective was an all- out attempt to get rid of Indians, to make them “civilized” Americans, and/ or “to keep them from being acculturated as members of a Salish community.” “The Indian must conform to the white man's ways,” says Thomas J. Morgan, the commissioner of Indian Affairs in 1889. About three generations of American Indian children attended Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) boarding schools, almost completely destroying the “social and cultural fabric” of their respective Indian nations. The assimilation era officially ended with the passage of the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934.
D'Arcy McNickle belongs to the first generation of American Indians to attend one of these government- run boarding schools, enrolling at Chemawa (Oregon) for three years. He, then, attended public schools in Montana and Washington. Later, as a diasporic Indian from the Salish nation, he attended college at the University of Montana, Oxford University in England, the University of Grenoble, Columbia University, and the New School in New York City, where he lived from 1926 to 1934.
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- A Theoretical Approach to Modern American History and LiteratureAn Issue of Reconfiguration and Re-representation, pp. 153 - 178Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2020