Heterogeneity and border thinking in Native American literature
This article shows how some theories from Latin America can be used to analyze Native American literature in Québec. The author first introduces the concept of heterogeneity as developed by the Peruvian literary critic Antonio Cornejo Polar, which claims that the socio-cultural reality of American societies can be seen as a “whole” in which various levels of tensions and conflicts deriving from the colonial experience operate, and how it converges with some of the proposals of Latin American colonial and “decolonial” studies. Subsequently, these theories are applied to the Native American literary field of Québec and show how the heterogeneity manifests a decolonized border thinking in the current literature through various devices such as border gnosis, other thought and other language. The aim of the author is illustrated with an analysis of the autobiography of An Antane Kapesh Je suis une maudite sauvagesse and the poetry collection Bâtons à message by Joséphine Bacon.