When Did Indians Become Straight?

When did Indians become straight? When we started pretending to be, with and without the help of those who would straighten us. Let's stop pretending or let's get crooked and pretend something better. Let's read Mark Rifkin's book that combines the best of historical inquiry, literary/theoretical analysis, and thinking outside straight lines in ways that confront us with the power of deviant views of familiar, and some unfamiliar, texts and policies. * Craig Womack, author of Drowning in Fire *
A fabulously original work! Two of America's leading authorities on Black Language and Culture draw on their expertise and extensive scholarship to profoundly reshape the national conversation on race by languaging it. In complicating compliments about President Obama's "articulateness," they brilliantly analyze his artful use of language and America's response to it as a springboard to consider larger, thought-provoking questions about language, education, power and what Toni Morrison has referred to as "the cruel fallout of racism." Few sociolinguists tackle these complex issues with as much insight, sophistication, and downright directness as Alim and Smitherman. As they firmly conclude, it's time to change the game - and this book does just that. * John R. Rickford, J.E. Wallace Sterling Professor of Linguistics and the Humanities at Stanford University, and co-author of Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English *
In asking 'When did Indians become straight?', Mark Rifkin isn't simply being provocative: he's setting the critical foundation for what is undoubtedly the most incisive, well-researched, respectful, and thoroughly engaging study of sexuality and gender in American Indian literature, and one of the best works of criticism in the field in recent years. * Daniel Heath Justice, Associate Professor of English, University of Toronto *
The ideas contained in Rifkin's book are fresh, provocative, and vital to understanding the American past, present and future. * LeftEyeOnBooks.com *
When Did Indians Become Straight? is a groundbreaking study of the uses of the native in the making of critical theory and national belonging. * Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Professor of Anthropology & Gender Studies, Columbia University *