Review of Contemporary Native Fiction of the U.S. and Canada: A Postcolonial Study by Punyashree Panda.

There are observers, particularly among American Indians themselves, who deny that the term 'postcolonial' can be applied to them, given that they are still colonised.There are others, however, for whom postcolonial analysis is eminently applicable to the Native American situation, including such central figures as Louis Owens (Choctaw-Irish), and clearly Punyashree Panda agrees.Her book accordingly applies postcolonial discourse analysis to four significant Native writers, persuasively situating their writing within interpretative practices widely associated with the work of postcolonial writers from other parts of the world.Panda's examination of her chosen writers is well supported by reference to critical currents within Native American studies as well as postcolonial studies, both areas represented by a selection of theorists and critics from each field.The confluence of interests in the two disciplines in critiquing the injuries of colonial oppression, which in the case of Indigenous nations are ongoing, is laid out in lucid fashion, with recourse to familiar observers as well as less familiar ones.With respect to the familiarity of the writers, three of the four texts chosen for analysiseach writer is represented by just one bookmight be thought to be somewhat overfamiliar in this context.Louise Erdrich's Tracks and Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, in particular, have received extensive critical treatment, while Thomas King's Green Grass, Running Water is not much less well-known.Only Métis Maria Campbell's Halfbreed does not belong to the acknowledged canon of North American Indigenous writing, although it is well-known in Canada.From one angle, of course, dealing with such widely-taught texts makes the book's syntheses of the debates surrounding them of relevance to courses where they are included.Despite these useful characteristics, however, the book contains serious flaws at the level of writing and editing.To take the latter first, there are numerous typographical mistakes, punctuation errors and formatting inconsistencies, including within quotations, beginning on the table of contents where one text is in italics while the other three are not.Neither the author nor the publisher appear to know that the frequently-mentioned Frantz Fanon's name has a 't'.More seriously, the constant use of words or grammatical constructions that are wrong is not acceptable in scholarly work.There is a certain irony in making this observation, given that the book refers to how '[u]sing the very language of the colonizer, postcolonial writers break the rules set forth by colonials in the act of their writing' (11).In the very next line Panda proves her point by saying: 'Postcolonial writing makes a conscious effort to demur the stereotypes and reestablish their identities' (11).A charitable reader might find the use of 'to demur' here creative and bold, and perhaps I would too were it not for all the other non-standard uses that cannot, even charitably, be considered a postcolonial wresting of control of the language from hegemonic forces.When there are so many of them, they become an irritant, a barrier to the circulation of Panda's thinking about the interesting material she is dealing with.Moreover, they frequently do her thinking a disservice by striking a jarring note: what does it mean to say that Donna Benet 'gives a wholesome idea of what postcolonial is all about' (9)?How ready are readers of English to accept structures such as: 'Erdrich achieves to present the novel "the Indian way"' (189) or neologisms such as '[t]he funkiesm of the community' (156)?

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