WRCM 310 - Indigenous Rhetorics: Native American Narratives of Survivance

FC ARHU CD WINT

4 credits
From early rhetorical practices to contemporary modes of expressing Indigenous life, practices of storytelling have served as anti-colonial tools for Native Americans since first contact with Europeans. Storytelling exerts forms of intellectual sovereignty that disrupts settler colonial knowledge production and asserts survivance. Engaging with a variety of texts (including novels and films), we will explore the narrative methods used by rhetors to address historical and contemporary Native American issues. Students will undertake discourse analysis, theoretical interventions, close textual reading, and visual analysis of Indigenous narratives to examine the possibilities of a rhetoric of survivance.