Chadwick Allen, renowned scholar in American Indian literary studies, is the featured speaker for the fourth annual American Indian Returnings lecture. Allen’s talk, “Across and Through These Lands: Earthworks, Indigenous Identity and Return,” suggests that indigenous mounds are America’s first literatures. This year’s lecture is Sept. 20 at 4:15 p.m. in the M. Smith Griffith Auditorium of the Georgia Museum of Art. The event is free and open to the public.
The American Indian Returnings, or AIR, series celebrates Native American scholars and authors and their “return” from exile to the Southeast.
“Each year on the autumnal equinox, a scholar focuses on Southeastern American Indian communities that were removed from their homelands in the 1830s—and their ‘return’ to the Southeast,” said LeAnne Howe, the Eidson Distinguished Professor in American Literature in the UGA English department. “We celebrate the return of Natives to the Southeast through the work of artists, writers and scholars who lecture for the AIR series.”
Allen’s work centers on studies of contemporary Native American and global indigenous literatures, other expressive arts and lifeways, such as mound or earthworks. He is the author of the books Blood Narrative: Indigenous Identity in American Indian and Maori Literary and Activist Texts and Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies. He also is co-editor, with Beth Piatote, of The Society of American Indians and Its Legacies, a special combined issue of the journals Studies in American Indian Literatures and American Indian Quarterly that was published 2013.
Allen was editor for the journal SAIL: Studies in American Indian Literatures from 2012-2017, and he served as the 2013-2014 president of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association. In addition to his primary work on indigenous self-representation, Allen has a strong secondary interest in U.S. frontier literature and the popular western, and he has written extensively on the Lone Ranger and Tonto.
Allen is currently associate vice provost for faculty advancement and the Russell F. Stark University Professor at the University of Washington.
The American Indian Returnings event is sponsored by the Eidson Foundational Fund in the English department, the creative writing program, associate professor Channette Romero and professor Jace Weaver, director of the UGA Institute of Native American Studies.