Vanessa Evans
(Appalachian State University)
“Imagining Otherwise: Indigenous Futurisms in Andrea L. Rogers’ Man Made Monsters“
June 18, 2024, 12:15pm, P 103 (Philosophicum)
Cherokee writer and scholar Daniel Heath Justice tells us that to live otherwise, we must first imagine otherwise (156). Taking Justice’s claim seriously, this presentation considers how Andrea L. Rogers’ (Cherokee) short story “An Old-Fashioned Girl,” from her collection Man Made Monsters, (re)imagines Cherokee removal through fantasy and horror genre conventions. In this way, Rogers’ story functions as a work of Indigenous futurism(s) that contributes to the renewal, recovery, and extension of Indigenous peoples’ voices and traditions (Dillon 1–2).
Vanessa Evans (she/her) is a settler scholar and Assistant Professor of Indigenous Literatures at Appalachian State University in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. Her current monograph project investigates how contemporary Indigenous novels from North America, Oceania, and South Asia represent Indigenous resurgence. This research makes a case for the essential value of comparative, cross-cultural frameworks by reading trans-Indigenously across literary constellations of coresistance comprised of novels from seemingly disparate Indigenous nations. Vanessa’s recent essays appear or are forthcoming in Studies in the Novel (2022), The International Journal of Online Pedagogy and Course Design (2022), and Mapping World Anglophone Studies: English in a World of Strangers (2024). A co-edited collection with Mita Banerjee entitled Cultures of Citizenship in the Twenty-First Century: Literary and Cultural Perspectives on a Legal Concept was published with Transcript in early 2024. Vanessa is also a Co-Managing Editor for the Journal of Transnational American Studies.
You can download the poster for the event here.
