Creative Groundedness: Life through Brokenness and Breaking through in Michelle Good’s Five Little Indians

Abstract

This article offers a reading of Michelle Goods’ novel Five Little Indians (2020) with an emphasis on the representation of what I term creative groundedness. I draw on a combination of contemporary Indigenous scholarship (Coulthard, Justice, Simpson) and materialist feminist theories of affect (Ahmed, Berlant, Stewart) to examine the characters’ reinvention of their utterly broken lives through solidarity, respect and mutual support. Focusing on the potential interconnections among these diverse conceptual fields, this article probes the production of situated, relational, reciprocal and community-based practices and their potential to navigate “crisis ordinariness” (Berlant) through positive attachments in Good’s novel