How Is the Native American Culture Dying Out in Reservation Blues
journal article
Amerikastudien / American Studies
, pp. 417-443 (27 pages)
Published By: Universitätsverlag WINTER Gmbh
https://www. jstor .org/stable/41158322
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This article outlines a project on teaching Sherman Alexie's novel Reservation Blues (1992) in the EFL classroom as part of a transcultural and multimedia experience. It sets out from the stereotypical and backward-looking, popular (here: cinematic) constructions of Native Americans and contrasts these with Alexie's view of Native American realities past and present and his vision of how to survive against the claims of a predominant white environment. A discussion of a short story sketches out the complexities of present-day Indianness. The main part discusses in some detail how Alexie's novel sets cultural sensitivity (with a focus on music, storytelling, and religion) against the depressing real-life conditions to create a slightly optimistic blending of Indian, white, and black cultural modes, enabling the main character to survive against the odds. This tendency is found again in the pop-style cross-over music of a CD that Alexie has produced on the poetic chapter openings of his novel, and in his 1998 movie, Smoke Signals, in which both topical elements and characters reappear, although in reshaped form. To Alexie, culture is a dynamic balancing act between cultural change and preservation. With regard to the perception of cultural Others' in general and Native Americans in particular, this broadly contextualized and historicized transcultural and multimedia approach sensitizes students to the need for negotiating between their own internal and external cultural perspectives— a selfreflection crucial to the process of intercultural learning.
Amerikastudien /American Studies is the official journal of the German Association for American Studies. The quarterly is dedicated to an interdisciplinary concept of American Studies and covers all areas from literary and cultural criticism, history, political science, and linguistics to the teaching of American Studies. Thematic issues alternate with regular issues gathering articles from different areas of American Studies. The review section also features surveys of the contributions of scholars from German-speaking countries to American Studies. An annual bibliography regularly documents publications in American Studies from German-speaking countries. Universitätsverlag Winter also publishes the American Studies monograph series. Both the journal and the monograph series present an indispensable European dimension of the field of American Studies.
Universitätsverlag WINTER is an academic publisher located in Heidelberg, Germany, who covers the whole field of Humanities with particular interest in literature and language studies. Founded already in 1822, the publishing house is closely associated with 'Heidelberg Romanticism'. Today, WINTER publishes eleven journals like Amerikastudien, Anglistik, Beiträge zur Namenforschung, the journal devoted to German literary history (now over a century old) Euphorion, the Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift, Gymnasium, a journal dealing with traditional humanistic education embracing the teaching of classical languages, the Romanistische Zeitschrift für Literaturgeschichte, Sprachwissenschaft, the Zeitschrift für Slavische Philologie, and Trumah, the journal of the College of Jewish Studies in Heidelberg. Recently added to this collection has been Comparatio, offering theoretically advanced comparartive studies. WINTER also presents about 150 monographs and collections per year within a number of well-established series, several of them in co-operation with Heidelberg University and the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences.
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Amerikastudien / American Studies © 2007 Universitätsverlag WINTER Gmbh
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Source: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41158322
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