Picturing Worlds: Visuality and Visual Sovereignty in Contemporary Anishinaabe Writing

Taking up Lisa Brooks’s notion of “spinning the binary” between oral and literary forms and Christopher Teuton’s explication of the graphic mode, this book examines the uses that a range of Anishinaabe authors make of art and artists. Arguing that the mark on a surface—whether it be an ancient pictograph or a contemporary painting—intervenes, in the works under scrutiny, in such artificial divisions as precolonial/oral and postcontact/alphabetically literate societies, the text examines the ways Anishinaabe authors establish frameworks for continuity, resistance, and sovereignty in that “space” where conventional narratives of settlement read rupture. This book is a significant contribution to studies of the ways traditional forms of inscription support and amplify the oral tradition and in turn how both the method and aesthetic of inscription contribute to contemporary literary aesthetics and the politics of representation.