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• Title: Collaborative Authorship and Indigenous Literatures (Essay)
• Author : CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
• Release Date : January 01, 2011
• Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 90 KB

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One of the most fruitful (but almost certainly inadvertent) consequences of the ever-proliferating discourse on the "Death of the Author" has been the focus on the duality of the writer. Although many writers and scholars have not been persuaded that the author is either "dead" (Barthes 55) or merely "a discursive function" (Foucault 148), they openly concede that the producer of a text is not a unitary being. For Margaret Atwood, for example, writers are necessarily "double" (37) and two distinct individuals: "one that does the living and consequently the dying, the other that does the writing and becomes a name, divorced from the body but attached to the body of work" (62). Alexander Nehamas would seem to agree, suggesting that we should distinguish between the writer and the author: the "writer is a historical person, firmly situated within a specific context, the efficient cause of a text's production," exists "outside" that text, and is "not in a position of interpretive authority" over it (272). The author, in contrast, is a character in the text but one that is "manifested or exemplified in a text and not depicted or described in it" (273). Thus, "texts can be taken away from writers and still leave them who they are. Authors, by contrast, own their texts as one owns one's actions. Their works are authentically their own (eigentlich). They cannot be taken away (that is, reinterpreted) without changing their authors, without making the characters manifested in them different or even unrecognizable" (288-89). Not the least significant aspect of Nehamas's differentiation between writer and author is that it provides a possible way out of the impasse regarding the death (or life) of the author. I contend that this postulate is not as useful when it comes to Indigenous literatures, a field in which frequently one cannot even determine who the material producers of texts or their writers are. Among the defining characteristics of Indigenous literatures in the Americas is their high incidence of writer indeterminacy. From the Popol Vuh through Cogewea to I, Rigoberta Menchu, canonical Indigenous texts are often the result of collaboration, usually (but not always) involving both Indigenous and non-Indigenous individuals. It is commonly accepted that, in order for a text to be Indigenous, it must be written by an Indigenous person or persons. As Craig Womack states, for him what marks a "Creek work," in addition to its "depiction of a geographically specific Creek landscape and the language and stories that are born out of that landscape," is "its authorship by a Creek person" (20). Similarly, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn maintains that Indigenous literature must be created by writers with a strong "connection to tribal national life" (68), since presumably only such people are able to establish "a new set of principles that recognizes the tribally specific literary traditions by which we have always judged the imagination" (76). Or, as Jace Weaver encapsulates this position, "Native American literature, it must be said finally (and we would have thought it was obvious), is literature of, from, by Native Americans, not about them--or, worse yet, set among them" (16). The linking of cultural authenticity and the writer's citizenship in Indigenous literature is underscored by the increasingly common practice of following the names of writers with their "specific tribal affiliations" (Hoy 20). Consequently, if a text turns out not to be fully produced by an Indigenous individual or individuals, its indigeneity is called into question.

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