Vanessa Evans
(Appalachian State University)
“Reading Resurgence: Contemporary Indigenous Novels as Constellations of Coresistance”
June 6, 2024, 18:15pm, P 109a (Philosophicum)
As settler countries contend with the complexity of Indigenous sovereignty and land-back movements, reconciliation, and the fallout from colonial schools, the relevance of Indigenous resurgence is rising on a global scale. This presentation considers how contemporary Indigenous novels from seemingly disparate Indigenous nations in North America, Oceania, and South Asia represent resurgence: the everyday practices that seek to regenerate and re-establish Indigenous nations (Simpson 2017). Accordingly, this research asks: what do literary representations of resurgence reveal about how diverse Indigenous contexts are (re)imagining Indigenous worlds? What might be gained by a comparative approach grounded in the understanding that distant contexts and peoples are connected and responsible to one another?
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.
