Agnieszka Gondor-Wiercioch

The article is a comparative analysis of contemporary Native American fiction (Louise Erdrich’s novels Love Medicine and The Bingo Palace, Sherman Alexie’s short story collec­tion The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven), and the series Reservation Dogs by Taika Waititi and Sterlin Harjo. The aim of the article is to indicate similarities in the construction of young protagonists of the selected literary texts and the series, with an emphasis on Indian stereotype deconstruction, survival humour and the genres. This last category encompasses bildungsroman, road novel/story, homing novel/story and magical realism. The methodology used in the article includes cultural studies, postcolonialism and postmodernism. The author of the article wants to argue that many stylistic devices used in the character construction in Reservation Dogs have appeared much earlier in the canonical works of Native American fiction and Waititi and Harjo seem to enter into an intelligent dialogue with the literary tradition because similarly to it, they affirm contemporary indigenous culture, stress its connection with popular culture and very often introduce the black humour which turns Native Americans into subjects of their narratives and gives them back control over their own stories.

In my article I am going to focus on the innovating way in which Colson Whitehead presents African-American history in his novel The Underground Railroad. Similarly, to the classical texts exposing erased and buried histories in the U.S. such as written by William Faulkner and Toni Morrison, Whitehead proposes a history lesson for Americans and non-Americans, but instead of producing another historical reconstruction, he uses the technique of multisynchronism combining the past, present and future that constantly interplay in his narrative. The plot that binds all other motives together is that of the Underground Railroad which is simultaneously referring us to the historical organization and a secret vehicle that never stops and thus it is a metaphor for actions undertaken to abolish systemic racism that never ends in the U.S. I would like to argue that apart from the above-mentioned literary strategies Whitehead also created timeless language so different from his literary predecessors like Faulkner and Morrison who often relied on modernist history reconstruction and the use of dialects (including AAVE). In my article I will not only attempt to answer the question if Whitehead’s formal achievements are indeed revolutionary, but I will analyse his way of incorporating Black history into fiction, trying to compare his diagnosis of the American society to the conclusions of Faulkner’s Light in August and Morrison’s Beloved. I will focus particularly on the combination of post-racial prose, speculative realism and afrofuturism.

This article analyses selected stereotypes present in the novels of Louise Erdrich – in the so-called Love Medicine series, The Round House, and LaRose. The author juxtaposes the deconstruction of stereotypes of Native Americans with the deepening of the psychological portraits of Polish Americans, focusing on the topics of history and religion. The most important motifs are the heroes’ dependence on fundamentally understood Catholicism and on Ojibwe shamanism. The article draws attention to the effects of forced Christianization for the Ojibwe people and to the unreflective continuation of Catholicism in the descendants of Polish immigrants, both of which lead to a blurring of identity and to internal conflicts oftentimes externalized through self-destructive actions. The author also draws attention to humorous themes that show how the characters deal with the dilemmas resulting from the conflict of cultures.