| Native Claims addresses Jewish immigrant and Native American intersections in an American modernist context. I define American modernism as constitutively identified with questions of language, citizenship, and identity. Native Americans began increasingly to assume critical importance in the construction of modernist American aesthetic and cultural identity, functioning as a flexible, unfixed signifier that could address, embody or challenge certain ideas of what it meant to be both a modern and a native American. At the same time that the Indian became a contested site of a culture of modernity, aesthetic modernism, and American identity, the Jew's position as the Indian's antithesis began to be consolidated. The writers discussed herein, through the binding together, against the grain, of Indian and Jew, could imaginatively inhabit the bodies both of Indians and aspirers to Indianness, both natives and aliens, primitives and moderns.;My discussion begins with the seventeenth-century theory that American Indians constituted the ten lost tribes, which was advocated by missionaries who aimed to convert both, but was also mined later on by both Native American and Jewish nationalists who used it to plead ethnic and national legitimacy. I concentrate primarily on one such advocate of the theory, Mordechai Manuel Noah, an early nineteenth-century diplomat, Jewish nationalist, and dramaturge, who continually cast the Indian both as Jew and as patriot, thus rendering the Jew an originary American citizen. Chapter two treats Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky (1917) as a discussion of language as a racial marker, transforming the Indian from ideal American to Indian as ethnic. Chapter three is about the Indian as Jewish cosmopolitan modern, examining Shriftn, a turn-of-the-century Yiddish literary journal, and its identification of cosmopolitanism, Indianness, modernism, and Jewish tropes as it attempted to claim its place as an American modernist journal. Chapter four discusses Nathanael West and the commodification and commercialization of group identities. Chapter five reads parallels between the re-emergence of Henry Roth, author of Call It Sleep (1934), in the 1960's, and the Native American literary renaissance of the same period: both merge messianic nationalism with a self-conscious (post)modernism. |
