Paula Gunn Allen Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Kenneth Lincoln

SOURCE: "The Now Day Indi'ns," in his Native American Renaissance, University of California Press, 1983, pp. 183-221.

An American educator and critic, Lincoln is the author of several books on Native American literature and culture. In the excerpt below, which appeared in 1982 as the foreword to Shadow Country and which appeared in slightly different form in the Summer 1982 issue of Four Winds: The International Forum for Native American Art, Literature, and History, he offers a thematic and stylistic analysis of Shadow Country.

Laguna mother, Lakota grandfather, Lebanese father, life on the margins of mainstream and Indian: Paula Gunn Allen lives somewhere between American norms and Native American closures. She writes in the shadows of visions, "fingering silence and sound" with a poet's touching measure. She sings of desire and grief, confusion and rage over a horizon note of loss. Shadow Country: that marginal zone of interfusions, neither the...
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