Breaking down the reservation fence: A postmodern Native American cultural discourse featuring Philip J. Deloria and Sherman Alexie [electronic resource]
Philip J. Deloria's Indians in Unexpected Places and Sherman Alexie's novels Reservation Blues and Indian Killer have outlined a discourse of cultural analysis, which blurs the boundaries between white America and Native America so irreversibly that it forges a Native American identity that is simultaneously Native and American. This thesis will suggest that Deloria and Alexie are participating in a contemporary discourse, validating one another's arguments by drawing similar conclusions through different mediums---the essay and the novel. The discourse moves beyond the rhetoric of Indian oppression as a result of white imperialism and concentrates on the positive miscegenation of mixed-cultural breeding, which leads to new forms of Native expression and identity. Using Deloria's historical revision in Indians in Unexpected Places as a touchstone, this thesis is a close reading of Alexie's two novels, which serve to capture the Native American artist's challenge in postmodern America
