Unsettling Fictions: Relationality as Decolonial Method in Native American and South African Literatures

Abstract

This article sets out a rationale for the comparative study of Native American and South African literatures. Though there are numerous points of overlap between Native American and South African experiences of colonial subjugation and anti-colonial modes of resistance, the literatures produced in these contexts are seldom considered in the same frame. Arguing for the need to move beyond inherited disciplinary categories, this article demonstrates the necessity of interrogating categorizations of postcoloniality and indigeneity in specific instances. Further, it thinks through the grounds on which Native American and South African texts can be read together, by focusing on literary engagements with Native American and African onto-epistemologies. I register relationality as a point of connection in close readings of two novels: Almanac of the Dead (1991) by Laguna Pueblo author Leslie Marmon Silko and The Quiet Violence of Dreams (2001) by the late South African author K. Sello Duiker. In these texts, I argue that the conceptualization of relationality between human and non-human others disrupts the separatist and hierarchical logic of coloniality. In undertaking this comparative work, this article contributes to a wider body of work being carried out by scholars across postcolonial and Indigenous studies, who seek to understand interconnected experiences of colonialism across diverse geographic, cultural, temporal and disciplinary spaces.