Over the course of the last twenty years, Native American and Indigenous American literary studies has experienced a dramatic shift from a critical focus on identity and authenticity to the intellectual, cultural, political, historical, and tribal nation contexts from which these Indigenous literatures emerge. The Oxford Handbook of Indigenous American Literature reflects on these changes and provides a complete overview of the current state of the field.

The Handbook's forty-three essays, organized into four sections, cover oral traditions, poetry, drama, non-fiction, fiction, and other forms of Indigenous American writing from the seventeenth through the twenty-first century. Part I attends to literary histories across a range of communities, providing, for example, analyses of Inuit, Chicana/o, Anishinaabe, and Métis literary practices. Part II draws on earlier disciplinary and historical contexts to focus on specific genres, as authors discuss Indigenous non-fiction, emergent trans-Indigenous autobiography, Mexicanoh and Spanish poetry, Native drama in the U.S. and Canada, and even a new Indigenous children's literature canon. The third section delves into contemporary modes of critical inquiry to expound on politics of place, comparative Indigenism, trans-Indigenism, Native rhetoric, and the power of Indigenous writing to communities of readers. A final section thoroughly explores the geographical breadth and expanded definition of Indigenous American through detailed accounts of literature from Indian Territory, the Red Atlantic, the far North, Yucatán, Amerika Samoa, and Francophone Quebec.

Together, the volume is the most comprehensive and expansive critical handbook of Indigenous American literatures published to date. It is the first to fully take into account the last twenty years of recovery and scholarship, and the first to most significantly address the diverse range of texts, secondary archives, writing traditions, literary histories, geographic and political contexts, and critical discourses in the field.

James H. Cox's profile page

Daniel Heath Justice (Cherokee Nation) is Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Literature and Expressive Culture and Chair of the First Nations Studies Program at the University of British Columbia, unceded Musqueam territory. His previous publications include a study of Cherokee literature, Our Fire Survives the Storm: A Cherokee Literary History, and The Way of Thorn and Thunder series from Kegedonce Press (omnibus edition from the University of New Mexico Press). His most recent publications are Badger, part of the Animal Series from Reaktion Books (UK), and the co-edited Oxford Handbook of Indigenous American Literature. Current works include the literary manifesto, Why Indigenous Literature Matters (forthcoming from Wilfrid Laurier University Press), a study of other-than-human kinship in Indigenous literary expression, and a new dark fantasy trilogy.

Daniel Heath Justice's profile page

"Full of humor and things Indian that are not usually given prominence.... [A]n exceptional achievement.... [I[t puts another nail in the coffin of the persistent fantasy that 'real' Indians and their traditions have vanished east of the Mississippi, the region where colonization happened earliest." --The Times Literary Supplement