Termination as the end of settler colonialism: Matthew Scully, ‘Between Two Emancipations: Louise Erdrich and the Politics of Disavowal’, MELUS, 2025 #mlaf010 | settler colonial studies blog

Termination as the end of settler colonialism: Matthew Scully, ‘Between Two Emancipations: Louise Erdrich and the Politics of Disavowal’, MELUS, 2025 #mlaf010

02May25

Excerpt: In her 1986 review of Louise Erdrich’s second novel, The Beet Queen (1986), Leslie Marmon Silko seems to praise Erdrich’s “dazzling and sleek” prose only to criticize what she reads as a postmodern aesthetic ideology that prioritizes language “without the tiresome interference of any historical, political or cultural connections the words may have had in the past” (178-79). For Silko, Erdrich’s postmodern aesthetic, by which she means an intensively self-referential style of writing, constructs its beauty at the expense of history and politics, both of which would only “muddy” the demands of “language itself” (179).¹ Erdrich’s postmodernist style only works, in other words, by emptying itself of any referential content, by disavowing the connective tissue otherwise signified by its language. Silko’s review has generated a great number of critical responses, including a response from Erdrich that intensified rather than mitigated this dispute with Silko.² While I have no desire to repeat or adjudicate these debates, I begin with this comment from Silko because she so concisely introduces a fraught relation between aesthetics and politics, especially in Erdrich’s fiction. Erdrich’s 2021 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Night Watchman (2020), offers an occasion to revisit the question of politics and history in her aesthetic project. The novel seems to foreground the very “muddy” territory—the imbrication of history, politics, and aesthetics—that Silko claims The Beet Queen avoids by presenting itself as an account of Indigenous resistance to the US government’s termination era policies (1940s-1960s), which refer to the ongoing formal and legal attempts to eliminate tribal sovereignty. Yet The Night Watchman’s explicitly political nature also introduces new ambiguities into its aesthetic project. This ambiguity stems in large part from the novel’s engagement with, and production of, disavowal as the structure that at once enables and disables the American political representations and expressions at the center of the narrative and its extratextual history.

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