How can we read and interpret diverse Indigenous literatures in ways that better reflect the global reality of Indigenous life? This talk offers one possible answer by presenting a framework for reading relationally across Indigenous novels and short stories from North America, Oceania, and South Asia. The literary constellations that structure these readings offer stories of resurgence that connect seemingly disparate Indigenous nations so we might imagine our worlds otherwise. Specific to this talk is a constellation focused on how queer and Two Spirit Indigenous kinships hold multiple relations at once, reminding readers of our varied and overlapping responsibilities to one another as members of a sharedplanet.

Vanessa Evans is a settler scholar and Assistant Professor in the English Department and Center for Global Indigenous Cultures and Environmental Justice on Onondaga Nation lands at Syracuse University. Focusing on representations of resurgence in contemporary Indigenous novels and short stories from North America, Oceania, and South Asia, her
monograph project — Reading Resurgence: Constellations of Coresistance for Indigenous Literary Studies — makes a case for the essential value of cross-cultural frameworks rooted in relationality. She is coeditor of Cultures of Citizenship in the TwentyFirst Century: Literary and Cultural Perspectives on a Legal Concept (2023) and also a co-managing editor for the Journal of Transnational American Studies.

This event is organised by the University of Bonn and the North American Studies Program and is a part of the "Current Issues in North American & Cultural Studies Lecture Series". 

This event is organized by the University of Bonn. If you have any questions or comments, please contact the organizer directly.