‘As foreign as it gets’: indigenous immigrants, transnationality, and rage in Sherman Alexie’s The Business of Fancydancing

ABSTRACT

The article considers Sherman Alexie’s directorial debut, The Business of Fancydancing (2002), as an important contribution to transnational cinema. It invites us to review our conceptions of outside/ inside, liminality, borders, and interstitiality in the light of the complicated political status of Native Americans—as (un)belonging members of dependent nations. It asks what cinematic aesthetic might be adequate to the contingent sovereignty of Native Americans. I examine the way a form of mise-en-abyme (in a story featuring a Native American poet heralded by non-Natives but rejected as ‘selling out’ by his own people) informs the challenges Native American filmmakers face themselves in trying to avoid the exploitation of their own culture. The analysis acknowledges how the ‘redundancy’ of Native Americans is given expressive form through a sonic and visual play with ‘indigenous rage’ and through discontinuous narrative structure. I argue that the film attests to Alexie’s preparedness to risk potentially counterproductive representations of indigenous self-realization in the context of a damaging history of cultural appropriation, and explore how Fancydancing attempts to transgress borders without erecting new ones.

KEYWORDS:

• Indigenous immigrants
• transnationality
• Native Americans
• indigenous rage
• interstitial space

Notes

1. See, for example, Forte (2010).

2. Discussing indigenous resistance and offering what she calls ‘an anticolonial approach to the maintenance of alterity,’ Flowers conceptualizes the notion of the settler: ‘It is a critical term that denaturalizes and politicizes the presence of non-Indigenous people on Indigenous lands, but also can disrupt the comfort of non-Indigenous people by bringing ongoing colonial power relations into their consciousness’ (Flowers 2015, 33).

3. See, for example, Rollings (2004) and Svingen (1987).

4. See, for example, Marciniak (2006, 2009, 2014).

5. And, quite likely, Alexie would call my effort ‘colonial literature,’ as he spoke about the issue of approaching Native American art by non-natives: ‘What do you think of artists of any kind – like authors, painters, and media makers, etc. – making work about a race, gender, or nationality that’s not their own? Like, if non-Native American people were to write about Native Americans and vice versa? ‘Well, artists can follow whatever path they want to, but they should also realize that they’re gonna be held to close scrutiny by the people they’re [making] work about. They have to expect it, but it also should be seen as what it is. You know, when non-Natives write about Natives, that’s colonial literature’ (Alexie 2013a).

6. Analyzing Fancydancing and looking at ‘innovative use of place and spectator positioning,’ Amy Corbin coins a term ‘nomadic spectatorship,’ which she explains as an experience ‘in which the visual positioning and structure of the film deny the spectator a constant point of view and therefore simulate a mental feeling of hybridity and contradiction’ (2013, 175–176).

7. See, for example, Estrada’s critique. Estrada critiques Fancydancing for ultimately not being able to perform as a ‘queer Native movie,’ which embraces ‘the Two-Sprit traditions’ (2010, 106).

8. In an interview with Robert Capriccioso, Alexie compares Smoke Signals and Fancydancing: ‘It’s interesting because Smoke Signals has really become a mainstream film; it has mainstream ambitions….It’s much easier for audiences to digest that work. It’s much more approachable, much more accessible. Fancydancing is not only odd because of its characters – you know, Indians – but it’s odd because of its aesthetic and its structure, so I think Fancydancing is much harder for people to get into it. When I was making it, one of the crew members said, ‘You know, Sherman, you’re making a film about a gay Indian poet – It’s too Indian for white people, it’s too white for Indians, and it’s too gay for everybody – nobody’s going to see this!’ So, I think he was right….It’s going to have a limited audience, always, but I don’t care. I made it because I wanted to make it, and the people who see it are great, I’m happy for that, but I’m not really interested in making a movie like Smoke Signals again’ (Capriccioso 2003).

9. Lee Schweninger pays particular attention to Mouse’s filmic recording: ‘The handheld camera serves both to insist on the realism as it evokes the ethnographic or anthropological documentary, and as witness’ (Schweninger 2013, 132).

10. The ‘Vanishing Indian’ is also a key figure and trope in American painting and sculpture. See, for example, Robert F. Berkhofer’s The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (1978), the breakthrough work on the history of the uses and abuses of the white man’s Indian.

11. Bauman uses these notions in relation to his discussion on what he calls ‘wasted lives,’ the superfluous population of migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers deemed by contemporary societies as ‘human waste or wasted humans’ (2004, 6): ‘Redundancy’ shares its semantic space with ‘rejects’, ‘wastrels’, ‘garbage’, ‘refuse’ – with waste’ (2004, 12).

12. For a compelling read on this moment in the context of divergent spectatorships, see Hausman (2010).

13. Youngberg, for example, focusing on the film’s coding practices and coded meanings – ‘trapdoors,’ as he calls them – draws attention to the meaning of the Shawl Dance, the first dance performed in the opening scenes by Seymour: ‘In this case, Seymour, the gay male, literally becomes a woman through his performance of the Shawl Dance, a dance that is intended to be exclusively in the cultural sphere of women’ (2008, 63).