Conclusion
The Puppet Show Is Not Over
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 June 2020
Summary
This conclusion offers a new template for approaching the apocalyptic landscape of contemporary advanced capitalist America, where environmental, political, racial, and class crises tend to simmer in silos, and where both Indians and southerners occupy outdated and discrete categories of stereotype. Gesturing toward new texts in the realm of virtual reality, this closing chapter demonstrates that Indigenous exceptionalism lingers in the American imagination as a confounding contradiction between the concealed horrors of national origins and the transcendent virtues of wisdom, catharsis, and deliverance. The Indians are always doomed, and yet they always manage to rise above as well - a paradox that the American narrative desperately needs and clings to, particularly when basic concepts like humanity and reality have become the slipperiest of conceits. Despite how acutely we might want to rescue the Indian from the heterotopias of modernity, these texts remind us again and again that these imaginative sites are the beginning and the end of our realities.
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- The Indian in American Southern Literature , pp. 221 - 238Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020