Native American Scholarship and the Transnational Turn/ Robert Warrior

The term transnational has had a strong impact in various corners of literary and cultural studies over the past decade, but is only now emerging as a significant category of analysis among Native American writers and critics and in Native American Studies. This essay grew out of a specific attempt to make some sense of why so many Native scholars in literary studies have steered clear of discourse on the transnational. Robert Warrior is Director of American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he is Professor of American Indian Studies, English, and History. 

Why transnationalism is important? Warrior introduces Ramon Saldivar state. Saldivar argues, the new questions that transnational analysis helps us formulate ‘are valuable because they have supplied so much moral resonance to contemporary dissident movements and have helped to destabilize the seemingly unshakable fixity of culture, politics, and the marketplace’. (120)

 

To prove the that Native scholars are not using the term transnational with any frequency Warrior is “checking the indices of many books from the field published after 1998 that were authored, or included a contribution, by a Native scholar, revealed that the terms transnational, transnationality or transnationalism were not deployed.” (120-121)

 

Warrior is interested in understanding the relative absence of a term like transnationality among Native scholars not as an alarming situation in which unsophisticated, uncritical revanchists refuse to participate in a broader world of theoretical insight (121-122)

 

The most recent notions of the transnational have progressed in some fashion from postcolonial studies. A major reason for the lack of engagement with transnationality by Native American scholars is the widespread rejection of postcolonial studies. Though it fails to take account of the formulations of the most nuanced of postcolonial scholars, this objection is grounded in the reality that Native Americans remain colonized peoples rather than people facing post-independence realities and challenges. Thus the post in post colonialism creates a stumbling block to engagement (122).

 

Native peoples continue to have political status as nations, at least in the US and Canada, we as scholars remain committed to framing and developing our work as members of our respective nations (126).

 

Transnationality … points not to the emergence of a new collective unit … but to the persistence of an old logic, the logic of capitalism. Market born and market driven, it is infinite in its geographical extension but all too finite in its aspirations. It offers no alternative politics, poses no threat to the sovereignty of the state (127)