Abstract
Within literary scholarship, there has been a tendency to impose a false binary upon oral and written literatures; however, there is a spectrum of cross-cultural literacies that bridge this imposed binary. By using techniques such as Indigenous literary nationalism (which uses nation-specific worldviews within analysis) alongside more traditional approaches to literature, researchers can bridge both theoretical and literary divides. One such approach is what I have called asymmetrical resistance literature which borrows from Indigenous ways of knowing, historiography, and meaning-making (book history). Specifically, I have relied on Emma LaRocque’s concept of “resistance scholarship,” Lisa Gitelman’s ideas related to meaning-making coupled with Paula McDowell’s emphasis that non-traditional forms of media are also literary “texts,” and my own idea of asymmetry as representing literatures that are distinct yet connected by the larger structure of colonialism. In this paper, I examine traditional and contemporary song literature from both nêhiyawak (Cree) and Gàidhealtachd (Scots Gaelic) communities as examples of asymmetrical resistance literature due to their experiences with settler colonialism. This work acknowledges the difficult reality that colonialism extends beyond the traditional ley lines of historical chronology – thereby establishing colonialism as an ongoing structure rather than an event – as well as the complex relationship between these two communities in terms of the Scottish shift from colonized to colonizer. This paper therefore acknowledges and outlines these historical complications and also integrates nation-specific methods into the work being performed in order to examine traditional language use in song literature as a form of colonial resistance.
Presenters
Taylor BrecklesTeaching and Research Assistant, English and Indigenous Studies, Simon Fraser University, British Columbia, Canada
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Conceptual Frameworks, Literature, Literary Criticism, Research Methods, Interdisciplinary, Language, Representation
