"Personal Totems": The poetics of the popular in contemporary indigenous popular culture in north america

Abstract

The main focus of this dissertation is placed squarely on cultural texts and productions by contemporary Indigenous artists that are of popular culture. The aim of this work is to examine closely a selection of contemporary works by Native American and First Nations authors that incorporate various aspects of mainstream Eurowestern popular culture into their creative makeup and/or draw on the archive of popular genre fiction. In doing so, I analyze in what exact ways popular stories and icons become reinterpreted to mirror the issues that concern Indigenous people of today’s North America. I argue that creative works of Indigenous popular culture make use of various conventions and frameworks of the popular in order to interrupt colonial cultural archives. In doing so, they perform cultural works which is simultaneously decolonial and resurgent. For the purposes of this study, I define Indigenous popular culture as a field of cultural production which encompasses cultural texts that make use of specific recurrent tropes, icons, and genres of globalized popular culture and simultaneously are situated in contemporary discourses on indigeneity and Indigenous cultural contexts. I further contend that Indigenous popular culture can be productively conceived of as a unified conceptual and cultural field which needs to be engaged on its own terms under the consideration of its own dynamics and specificities. This dissertation aims at helping consolidate this cultural field and develops one methodological blueprint for critical engagement with texts of Indigenous popular culture.