Thu 5 Jun 2014, 5.30-7pm Professor Gerald Vizenor: Native American Indian Literature of Survivance

Native literary transmotion is directly related to ordinary practices of survivance, a concept that is derived from relative observations of motion and totemic associations in Native American art, literature, and languages.The concept is a custom of resistance to the crafty ideologies of nationalism, ethnographic models, dummies, and cultural simulations, or pushy gossip theories. The visionary and totemic stories of creation are instances of literary transmotion, and the continuous variations of origin stories create a discrete sense of presence and survivance.

Gerald Vizenor is a prolific novelist, poet, literary critic, and the principal writer of the new Constitution of the White Earth Nation of the Anishinaabe in Minnesota.  He is Professor Emeritus of American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.  His novel Griever: An American Monkey King in China won the American Book Award and the New York Fiction Collective Award.

This event is co-organised by the University of Kent and the Institute of North American Studies, King’s College London.