Reinventing the Western Literary Canon
This new issue takes as its starting point Joy Harjo (Creek Muscogee)’s observation that “‘reinventing’ in the colonizer’s tongue and turning those images around to mirror an image of the colonized to the colonizers as a process of decolonization indicates that something is happening, something is emerging and coming into focus that will politicize as well as transform literary expression” (Harjo et al. 1998, 22). Postcolonial and Indigenous authors often appropriate the Western Literary canon, both in terms of form, language, and cultural elements in order to foreground their epistemologies and histories.