Bringing fresh insight to a century of writing by Native Americans

The Political Arrays of American Indian Literary History challenges conventional views of the past one hundred years of Native American writing, bringing Native American Renaissance and post-Renaissance writers into conversation with their predecessors. Addressing the political positions such writers have adopted, explored, and debated in their work, James H. Cox counters what he considers a “flattening” of the politics of American Indian literary expression and sets forth a new method of reading Native literature in a vexingly politicized context. 

Examining both canonical and lesser-known writers, Cox proposes that scholars approach these texts as “political arrays”: confounding but also generative collisions of conservative, moderate, and progressive ideas that together constitute the rich political landscape of American Indian literary history. Reviewing a broad range of genres including journalism, short fiction, drama, screenplays, personal letters, and detective fiction—by Lynn Riggs, Will Rogers, Sherman Alexie, Thomas King, Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich, Winona LaDuke, Carole laFavor, and N. Scott Momaday—he demonstrates that Native texts resist efforts to be read as advocating a particular set of politics

Meticulously researched, The Political Arrays of American Indian Literary History represents a compelling case for reconceptualizing the Native American Renaissance as a literary–historical constellation. By focusing on post-1968 Native writers and texts, argues Cox, critics have often missed how earlier writers were similarly entangled, hopeful, frustrated, contradictory, and unpredictable in their political engagements.

James H. Cox is Jane and Roland Blumberg Centennial Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin. He is author of The Red Land to the South: American Indian Writers and Indigenous Mexico (Minnesota, 2012).

"With his own array of historicist assiduity, keen sensitivity to contemporary issues, and a storyteller’s verve, James H. Cox uncovers the multitudes of political ambivalences that American Indian literature contains. He introduces a trove of unknown works and challenges us to make sense of them with our assumptions of what’s requisite for Native political perspectives. As he compellingly demonstrates, that’s a hard row to hoe."—Joshua B. Nelson, author of Progressive Traditions: Identity in Cherokee Literature and Culture

"In this field-changing study, James H. Cox introduces the political array, a paradigm that allows him to demonstrate that Native texts and their authors are more politically complicated—more nuanced, more situational, more dynamic and fluid—than our all too often reductive generalizations indicate. More, he makes visible previously understudied connections between pre- and post-1968 Native writers. Elegantly researched, wonderfully lucid, and truly essential."—Eric G. Anderson, George Mason University

"Cox’s monograph will prompt a variety of scholars to continue to add to and complicate what is an important and necessary endeavor—to understand the   complexities and contradictions that shape and are shaped by Indigenous literary  history in the United States."—Transmotion

"What Cox’s text offers is a new paradigm from which to consider the study of American Indian literature, and for that alone he should be justly lauded."—Tribal College