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Course unit, curriculum year 2021–2022
KIE.KK.356

Indigenous Literary Geographies: Decentring America, 5 cr

Tampere University
Teaching periods
Active in period 3 (1.1.2022–6.3.2022)
Course code
KIE.KK.356
Language of instruction
English
Academic years
2021–2022, 2022–2023, 2023–2024
Level of study
Advanced studies
Grading scale
General scale, 0-5
Persons responsible
Responsible teacher:
Johannes Riquet
Responsible organisation
Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences 100 %
Coordinating organisation
Language Studies 100 %
Common learning outcomes
International outlook and global responsibility

This course examines the spatial and geographical dimensions of Indigenous literatures from North America and regions with political and cultural ties to North America. Literary geography started as an interdisciplinary examination of literary texts through geographical methods and lines of enquiry, such as the use of maps to trace the movements of characters in novels and generate insights about their significance. Understood more broadly, it refers to the study of various transfers between literature and geography, from the imagined geographies created by literary texts to the links between literature and cartography. The geographical imaginaries of Indigenous literatures, however, are often very different from those of Western literature. Any attempt to study these literary geographies should therefore also pay attention to Indigenous concepts of space, place, and geography – such as the Inuit concept of sila (which means, among other things, ‘climate,’ ‘sky,’ and ‘universe’) or the Pacific concept of (‘the space in between’).

Moving from the Canadian Arctic to New Mexico and the American Pacific, the course charts different ways in which Indigenous authors have imagined geography for various social, cultural, and political purposes – to transmit and transform cultural memory, to express shifting cultural identities, and to create decolonial impulses. We will thus discuss issues such as the relationship between humans and the land in N. Scott Momaday’s novel House Made of Dawn, the performance of sea stories in Samoan-American author Sia Figiel’s play Fāgogo O Samoa, and the homage to ancestral voyaging in Leslie Marmon Silko’s poem “Prayer to the Pacific.” Throughout the course, we will pay special attention to the narrative and poetic forms through which geography is imagined, and the oral storytelling traditions (such as Inuit unikkaaqtuat and Samoan fāgogo) that are reinvented in contemporary Indigenous writing – as well as, more fundamentally, the links between language and land that run through these texts. Ultimately, our journey through these texts will help us reimage, decentre, and expand the very notions of ‘America’ and ‘American literature.’

Learning outcomes
Further information
Studies that include this course
Completion option 1
This course will be offered during the academic year 2021-2022.

Participation in teaching

11.01.2022 26.02.2022
Active in period 3 (1.1.2022–6.3.2022)