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Mosaics Of Wholeness: Healing Through Queer Indigenous Self-Telling In Billy-Ray Belcourt’s A History Of My Brief Body And Deborah A. Miranda’s Bad Indians
Cook, Jessica Cook, Jessica
Cook, Jessica
Cook, Jessica
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Abstract
This thesis examines texts by two queer Indigenous writers, Billy-Ray Belcourt (Driftpile Cree) and Deborah A. Miranda (Ohlone/Costanoan Esselen), to consider how writing about the self—what the Western literary canon commonly terms “memoir” or “autobiography”—is a form of healing in the afterlife of settler-colonialism. Through close readings of Belcourt’s essay collection A History of My Brief Body and Miranda’s Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir, this thesis explores how Belcourt and Miranda both invent and reclaim the Indigenous self through the construction of metaphorical mosaics which, in their assembled wholeness, reflect a kind of “living through” of colonialism. Within this framework, this thesis goes on to argue that the stories of the self crafted by Belcourt and Miranda effectively reconstruct the queer Indigenous embodied self, writing against the colonial imagination with assertions of non-heteronormative sexual desire.
Title
Mosaics Of Wholeness: Healing Through Queer Indigenous Self-Telling In Billy-Ray Belcourt’s A History Of My Brief Body And Deborah A. Miranda’s Bad Indians
Date
2022-05
Subject
Indigenous
queer
sexuality
colonialism
postcolonialism
Billy-Ray Belcourt
Deborah Miranda
queer
sexuality
colonialism
postcolonialism
Billy-Ray Belcourt
Deborah Miranda
Material type
Collections
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Cook-Jessica-thesis.pdf
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Abstract
This thesis examines texts by two queer Indigenous writers, Billy-Ray Belcourt (Driftpile Cree) and Deborah A. Miranda (Ohlone/Costanoan Esselen), to consider how writing about the self—what the Western literary canon commonly terms “memoir” or “autobiography”—is a form of healing in the afterlife of settler-colonialism. Through close readings of Belcourt’s essay collection A History of My Brief Body and Miranda’s Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir, this thesis explores how Belcourt and Miranda both invent and reclaim the Indigenous self through the construction of metaphorical mosaics which, in their assembled wholeness, reflect a kind of “living through” of colonialism. Within this framework, this thesis goes on to argue that the stories of the self crafted by Belcourt and Miranda effectively reconstruct the queer Indigenous embodied self, writing against the colonial imagination with assertions of non-heteronormative sexual desire.
Duration
Location
Advisor
Sponsor
Course
Department
English
Degree
Master of Arts (MA)