Listening to Bamewawagezhikaquay’s Teachers: Jane Johnston Schoolcraft’s Citational Cosmopolitics

Document Type

Open Access Article

Authors

Shelby Johnson, Oklahoma State University - Main CampusFollow

Author Biography

Shelby Johnson is an assistant professor at Oklahoma State University, where she researches and teaches on sexuality, race, and ecocriticism in the long eighteenth century. She is completing a book arguing that figures of a gifted earth organize anticolonial intimacies.

Abstract

This article argues that Bamewawagezhikaquay, or Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, offers vital citations of Anishinaabe cosmologies, including lineages of human and nonhuman teachers and perspectives on animate archives that should inflect new approaches to textual studies. Bamewawagezhikaquay’s writings express a citational cosmopolitics, a practice where Bamewawagezhikaquay invokes, and occasionally translates into English, human and more-than-human agents in the cocreation of Anishinaabe knowledge. In her descriptions of Anishinaabe plants and geographies, she models a citational praxis that intersects with resurgent frameworks on orienting to Anishinaabe writings, including birchbark maps and cliff paintings, not as inert objects but as dynamic nodal points in shared and ongoing acts of communication.

(In the issue section "Bibliographic Knowledge(s)")

Recommended Citation

Johnson, Shelby (2022) "Listening to Bamewawagezhikaquay’s Teachers: Jane Johnston Schoolcraft’s Citational Cosmopolitics," Criticism: Vol. 64: Iss. 3, Article 18.
Available at: https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/criticism/vol64/iss3/18