"Contemporaneities of Indigenous Poetry in the United States"
Special issue on the « Contemporaneities of Indigenous Poetry in the United States »
Edited by Aurore Clavier (U. Paris Cité), Mathilde Louette (U. Paris Cité) and Baptiste Rembert (Sorbonne U.)
ARGUMENT:
“It is often said that we original inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere are the most written about peoples on earth. But our own writing is often ignored or placed in restrictive contexts that keep us in the past and far from the words contemporary or new” (Erdrich, 2018 xv). By focusing on the “contemporaneities of Indigenous poetry,” this special issue of Transatlantica: American Studies Journal sets itself a double ambition: not only does it seek to examine the poetic production of the last decades in order to address the distortions lamented by Heid Erdrich, but, more broadly, it also aim to question the historical paradigms which still often underpin the constructions of American literature, by examining the coincidences and continuities as well as the tensions and frictions running through Indigenous temporalities.
“Firsting and lasting”—for Jean O’Brien, these paired concepts best describe the ideological crucible where the colonial history of New-England, and later that of the United States as a whole, has shaped its own justification, claiming an “exclusive sway over modernity,” while relegating Indigenous Nations to the past, thereby consigning them to a supposed extinction (O’Brien, 2010 xiii). From Hiawatha’s crepuscular song by Longfellow to Whitman’s evanescent “Indian” figures, from William Carlos Williams’ melancholic primitivism to Gary Snyder’s shamanic appropriations, the history of US literature has also fashioned itself after this model. Its canon could only be original, modern, modernist, or post-modern, it could only leave the shadow cast by “old” Europe, by removing from its timeline the Indigenous voices, songs, stories that not only predated it, but also continued to reinvent themselves despite their foretold obsolescence. If the movement of political and artistic affirmation initiated in the 1960-70s has enabled new voices to emerge, and beyond that, to form the major literary lineages many poets still identify with, the specter of a colonial rather than Indigenous literary history still underlies its description as a “Native American Renaissance,” in Kenneth Lincoln’s famous words (1983). Not even the revisionary practices of New Historicism have entirely managed to escape the blind spots of critical canons, calling for scholars to address the “Indian problem” of Modernist Studies (Brown, 2017) and of other periods in their wake. Today, many artists and critics are attempting to correct this history, against the dated stereotypes that continue to shape many readers’ perceptions or editorial circuits, beneath the superficial claims of tokenism (Erdrich, 2018 xv).Rather than invite us to simply replace Indigenous literature into a common present, to argue for a shared contemporaneity, or to assume the synchronicity of Indigenous and settler histories within a supposedly neutral time frame, this observation engages us to (re)read twentieth- and twenty-first-century works through the multiple, complementary, or conflicting temporalities they juxtapose, confront, disarticulate, and reconfigure. “Pluralizing time” and its “frames of reference” thus becomes a means to affirm “temporal sovereignty,” against or “beyond settler time” (Rifkin, 2017 20-22; Simpson, 2017 20) and its injunctions to choose between “aboriginal purity”—whether defined as cultural or racial—(Barker, 2011 20) or dissolution into the imposed courses of national and literary histories. At stake is not the mere substitution of one timeline for another, so much as the moments, rhythms, periods, durations, “(un)interruptions” (Simpson A., 2014), returns, resurgences and insurgencies (Simpson L., 2011), configurations and “orientations” (Ahmed, 2006 15) that make alternative ways of “being-in-time” possible (Rifkin, 2017 20). Unmeasuring one’s time, writing out of time, thinking of the lasting time, the time left, the time being, the coming times, appear as so many ways of opposing the whole repertory of untimely possibilities to the forced trajectory of the colonial present.
Such temporal disconnections or intricacies reassert the primacy of forms and the “affordances” of poetic language (Levine, 2015). What temporalities does Indigenous poetry hold? In what forms, under what conditions of “survivance” (Vizenor, 1999), “resurgence” (Simpson L., 2011), or emergence, through what filiations, what circulations, do the works define their own contemporaneity? By foregrounding works published over the recent decades and poets who navigate between various generations, Nations, and cultural milieux—such as Tommy Pico, Natalie Diaz, Layli Long Soldier, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Sherwin Bitsui, Laura Da’, Heid Erdrich, Joy Harjo, LeAnne Howe, Brandy Nālani McDougall to name only a few—this issue aims to enrich the discussion between poetic creation, political critique, formal experimentation and mediatic transformations, in order to foreground the (un)making of the “contemporary.”
Besides the literary, historical and epistemological questions it will address, this issue will also underscore the crucial importance of Indigenous studies, an essential political and academic field in the Americas and beyond, now significantly resonating in Europe (as the scientific activities of the American Indian Workshop testify to) and in France (with the creation of a French network on Indigenous studies). This special issue of Transatlantica aims to contribute to these ongoing transnational conversations.
By focusing on Native American poetry from the United States, this issue also seeks to remedy the relative critical neglect the genre has received, despite the dynamism of its creative scene. Echoing Heid Erdrich or Joy Harjo’s lament that Native poets have been underrepresented in the “American book of poetry” (Harjo, 2021 xiv) and in literary institutions, the lesser attention given to poetical works and their temporal expressions betrays enduring academic orientations. Although several generations of Native writers and scholars have deeply transformed the poetic landscape, Kimberly Blaeser’s 2006 observation about the lower number of published works at hand is still valid (R. Fast, The Heart as a Drum; N. Wilson, The Nature of Native American Poetry; or D. Rader and J. Gould, Speak to Me Words). Also adding to a special issue on contemporary poetry published in Studies in American Indian Literatures in 1995, this number has since then been increased by important critical studies (such as C. Santos-Perez, Navigating Chamoru Poetry or A. Webster,Explorations in Navajo Poetry and Poetics), doctoral dissertations, or opening chapters in various Routledge, Oxford or Columbia companions or handbooks. In France, the body of work devoted to this literature has mainly focused on narrative pieces, while poetry has been the focus of sparse translations (by B. Machet, M. Capelle, H. Esquié), a few symposia (“‘Making Places to Live’: Native American Poetry Past and Present” [UPV, 2010]; or the most recent, “Images and Words Beyond Borders” [UBO, 2025]), and recent or ongoing doctoral theses (S. Papa, B. Rembert, A.-C. Pélabon, C. Lopez). By bringing together and confronting these vital forces within a single issue, we hope to amplify what definitely looks like a key moment in Native poetry studies.
The issue will gather articles that associate both studies of contemporary poetic and critical works (late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries), and a reflection on the very notion of “Indigenous contemporaneities” and the multiple questions they raise. Possible topics may include, but are not limited to:
- Contemporary communities: literary generations, networks, genealogies and histories
- The forms, formats and mediums of time: poetics, materialities and technologies of the contemporary
- Temporal literacies and sensibilities: writing / reading / perceiving the time(s) of poetry
- Counter-memories of the present: archives, absences, resurgences, transmissions
- Contemporary intersections: queer, forked, minoritized temporalities
- Simultaneous spaces: territorial presence and political sovereignty, environmental urgences/endurances
- Contemporaneous thought(s): shared knowledges, theoretical configurations and temporal epistemes
The living and committed nature of Indigenous poetry calls for an openness to non-academic contributions, in addition to scientific articles. We welcome formats where the voices of poets can foster a dialogue between creation and criticism. Possible outlets could include:
- Interviews with Indigenous poets
- Collaborative or individual translations
- Critical or artistic contributions
- Pedagogical reflections
EDITORIAL INDICATIONS :
Our issue will follow the Transatlantica guidelines. Meant for online publication, articles are not submitted to a strict length limit, but authors are advised not to exceed 60.000 signs (including spaces). We welcome contributions in English or in French. For more details about the format of your submission, please refer to the Transatlantica stylesheet : https://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/5220 (English) https://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/4991 (French)
Publication is planned in the last issue of 2027. We thus invite you to submit a paper proposal (approx.. 700 words) along with a biographical notice (approx. 200 words) by September 15, 2026, and your finalized article by April 1st, 2027 to allow time for the editorial and peer-reviewing process. Please write to the following addresses to submit your proposal or any question you might have:
Thank you !
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