Reimagining the Scene of Interpretation: Engaging the Trans-Indigenous — A Talk by Chadwick Allen

We have all heard the recent calls to “decolonize” the academy and, in particular, humanities fields such as literary studies. Beyond providing a catchy slogan, what might “decolonization” mean for the practice of our scholarship? As a beginning of an answer, Chadwick Allen revisits his 2012 book Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies and considers what has—and, importantly, what has not—changed within literary studies marked as “comparative,” “world,” and/or “global” in the decade since the book’s publication. How have provocations to center the Indigenous as an optics and as a mode of analysis been taken up, extended, critiqued, or reimagined by others? And what else might be done?

Chadwick Allen is Professor of English, Adjunct Professor of American Indian Studies, and a founding Co-Director of the Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies (CAIIS) at the University of Washington, where he also serves as the Associate Vice Provost for Faculty Advancement.

Professor Allen’s work centers around studies of contemporary Native American and global Indigenous literatures, other expressive arts, and activism.  Author of the books Earthworks Rising: Mound Building in Native Literature and Arts (U of Minnesota P, 2022), Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies (U of Minnesota P, 2012), and Blood Narrative: Indigenous Identity in American Indian and Maori Literary and Activist Texts (Duke UP, 2002), he is co-editor, with Beth Piatote, of The Society of American Indians and Its Legacies (a special combined issue of the journals Studies in American Indian Literatures and American Indian Quarterly, 2013).  He is a former editor for the journal Studies in American Indian Literatures and a past President of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA). In addition to his primary work on Indigenous self-representation, Professor Allen has a strong secondary interest in US frontier literature and the popular western, and he has written extensively on the Lone Ranger and Tonto.

Co-sponsored by Arabic Studies, Institutional Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, American Studies, Art History, Class of ’46 Fund for World Brotherhood, Comparative Literature, History, Just Futures, the Lecture Committee.