In an essay subtitled "Native American Voices and Postcolonial Theory," Louis Owens criticizes postcolonial theorists
who claim to represent a wide panoply of minority voices yet fail to recognize the existence of a resistance literature
arising from "indigenous, colonized inhabitants of the Americas." Owens asks rhetorically what the indigenous Native
American must do "to be allowed a voice like Shakespeare's cursing Caliban" without resorting to mimicking the
language of the "colonial center" that determines legitimate discourse (in Gretchen Bataille, ed., NATIVE AMERICAN
REPRESENTATIONS, 13, 22). Elizabeth Cook-Lynn has argued for the development of a nationalistic, Third World
approach to the development and interpretation of Native works, enjoining Native writers to represent the myths and
metaphors of tribal sovereignty rather than the hybridity and cosmopolitanism of mainstream writing and criticism ("The
American Indian Fiction Writers: Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, the Third World, and First Nation Sovereignty").

This collection will be submitted in consideration for publication as a special issue of the peer-reviewed AMERICAN
INDIAN CULTURE AND RESEARCH JOURNAL. The editors seek submissions that examine resistance and indigenous
nationalism in contemporary American Indian performance within a specific political and historical landscape. Papers
are invited to address a broad range of performance practices, from overtly political actions such as political speeches, to
cultural festivals, to dance theater, to more conventionally staged theatrical events. How do such performances "re-
present," to borrow Kathryn Shanley's term, American Indian history and culture? What does it mean to say that a specific
performance enacts cultural resistance? How are theories and practices of staged representation connected to those of
political representation? How have Native American performances engaged political questions of community,
authenticity, and what Gerald Vizenor has called "Trickster hermeneutics"?

Possible topics include:

* the performance of indigenous sovereignty
* collective political self-recovery, decolonization
* the imagining and construction of liberatory identities
* performance as revisionist history
* cultural hybridity, impurity, and syncretism
* nationalism and transnationalism
* diasporic performance

Please email a 500-word abstract and brief bio to editor_at_aisc.ucla.edu by March 6, 2006.

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Received on Tue Feb 07 2006 - 13:17:06 EST