SEPARATION ANXIETIES - Lsu - Louisiana State University

literary criticism, written by Native authors, is part of sovereignty: Indian people exercising the
right to present images of themselves and to discuss those images. Tribes recognizing their own
extant literatures, writing new ones, and asserting the right to explicate them constitute a move
toward nationhood” (14). In Womack’s terms, when a member of an oppressed group writes a
literary text, or a critical text, it is an overtly political, perhaps even nationalistic, act.
Yet the texts that I will study herein are not always written by members of oppressed
groups. Womack might consider these authors to be colonizers whose work represents the
appropriation of minority cultures; at the very least, their decision to write about or from the
perspective of oppressed peoples might be seen as co-opting the publishing market of minority
writers and thereby reducing the chances that the oppressed can speak for themselves. While I
understand the sentiment, this viewpoint seems unnecessarily reductive, perhaps even unfair to
the artists. Writers and filmmakers could well be using their work to explore, interrogate, and
perhaps even deconstruct hegemonic power structures and their own possible complicity in them.
In any case, and without dismissing Womack’s passionate arguments, I shall not be taking up the
question of who has the right, or the obligation, or the responsibility, to write about whom. I
include a discussion of Womack’s theories here to establish the existence of another branch of
literary separatist thought and to build on his idea that texts by and about separatists—even
fictional texts, and, in my case, works by authors from the dominant culture—are increasingly
important to the global embrace of multiple and multicultural voices.
Critics like Romine and Womack help to demonstrate recent critical interest in studies of
fictional communities and separatism, as well as to establish what terms like “community” and
“separatism” might mean to different people(s). Other critics demonstrate that America’s rhetoric
of unity—both problematized and mimicked in separatist communities—has perhaps always
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