Jennifer Andrews

In the Belly of a Laughing God: Humour and Irony in Native Women's Poetry (Heritage)

by Jennifer Andrews

University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division

May 30, 2011

802035671

How can humour and irony in writing both create and destroy boundaries? In the Belly of a Laughing God examines how eight contemporary Native women poets in Canada and the United States - Joy Harjo, Louise Halfe, Kimberly Blaeser, Marilyn Dumont, Diane Glancy, Jeannette Armstrong, Wendy Rose, and Marie Annharte Baker - employ humour and irony to address the intricacies of race, gender, and nationality. While recognizing that humour and irony are often employed as methods of resistance, this careful analysis also acknowledges the ways that they can be used to assert or restore order.Using the framework of humour and irony, five themes emerge from the words of these poets: religious transformations; generic transformations; history, memory, and the nation; photography and representational visibility; and land and the significance of 'home.' Through the double-voice discourse of irony and the textual surprises of humour, these poets challenge hegemonic renderings of themselves and their cultures, even as they enforce their own cultural norms.

Border Crossings: Thomas King's Cultural Inversions

by Arnold E. Davidson, Priscilla Walton, Jennifer Andrews

University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division

April 5, 2003

802041345

Thomas King is the first Native writer to generate widespread interest in both Canada and the United States. He has been nominated twice for Governor General's Awards, and his first novel, Medicine River, has been transformed into a CBC movie. His books have been reviewed in publications such as The New York Times Book Review, The Globe and Mail, and People magazine. King is also the author of the serialized radio series The Dead Dog Café and is an accomplished photographer. Border Crossings is the first full-length study to explore King's art.Davidson, Walton, and Andrews employ a framework of postcolonial and border studies theory to examine the concepts of nation, race, and sexuality in King's work. They examine how King's art routinely explores cross-cultural dynamics, including Native rights and race relations, American and Canadian cultural interaction, and the artistic traditions of Europe and North America. The authors argue that, by situating these concepts within a comic framework, King avoids the polemics that often surface in cultural critiques. His writing engages, entertains, and educates. This provocative analysis of King's art reads across cultures and between borders, and makes an important contribution to the study of Native writing, Canadian and American literature, border studies, and humour studies.