Native peoples today are best known through their fugitive poses: textual and graphic depictions steeped in a modernist aesthetic of romantic victimry, tragedy, and nostalgia. In Fugitive Poses Gerald Vizenor argues that such representations celebrate the absence rather than the presence of the Native. "This collection of five essays by the Anishinaabe novelist and scholar Gerald Vizenor will have the impact of a large firecracker lobbed into the middle of a Sunday School picnic. . . . Vizenor argues that the objectivizing view of indians as aesthetic simulations or as tragic losers, is not only paternalistic but disempowering. . . . Fugitive Poses is a worthwhile and provocative contribution to critical debate."— Times Literary Supplement "Vizenor's writing releases words. Those usually kept in their places in the dictionary and the dominant way of thought, but which are alive, words still on the building-meaning block and wished to be loosed to roam again. . . . His book is a campground of many voices. A get-together. A literate powwow."— Great Plains Quarterly "[Vizenor's] reading is vast and erudite; his use of it eclectic and ingenuous. . . . This book well rewards the effort of decoding."— Choice Gerald Vizenor is a professor of American studies and Native American literature at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of more than twenty books, including Griever: An American Monkey King in China , winner of the American Book Award. Used Book in Good Condition