• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.57 no.4
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• pp.599-624
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• 2011

Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian (and the Border Trilogy) can be used as a touchstone with which the limit of American literature is tested. For his text is particularly significant in the sense that its language mixes English with Spanish; its characterization confronts Americans with non-Americans; and its narrative structure traverses the geographical and symbolic borderlands between America and Mexico. In this sense, his novels deserve to be reexamined under the rubric of Chicano/a Studies, Hemispheric American Studies, transnationalism, etc. Rereading McCarthy's Blood Meridian, this paper attempts to rethink its historical complexity in relation to Manifest Destiny, focusing on the border-crossing motifs of filibustering and scalp-hunting. For this purpose, I pay due and careful attention to the ways in which the ideology of Manifest Destiny was created, circulated, and manipulated among the 19th century American expansionists and border-crossing agents. Of course, my discussion does not omit the significance of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands in the contemporary Chicano/a Studies and Hemispheric American Studies. In these historical and interdisciplinary contexts, I investigate how the 19th century filibusters like Captain Smith and his followers fall prey to the imperial practice of Manifest Destiny. I would also interrogate whether and how the Glanton Gang's scalp trade is involved in the capitalist desire of Manifest Destiny.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.51
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• pp.45-71
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• 2018

This essay explores Louise Erdrich's politically resistant voice which interrogates and disrupts the long-lasting, pernicious misbelief about Native Americans as 'vanishing people'. This essay chiefly focuses on the two female characters-Lulu Nanapush and Marie Lazarre Kashpaw-in the author's widely acclaimed novel Love Medicine (1993). First, illustrating the Chippewas' multifaceted resistances against white Americans' colonialist dominance disclosed in their enforcement of governmental policy, law, religion, and culture, this essay investigates how Erdrich does not stop telling her story that the idea of 'vanishing people'-another version of 'Manifest Destiny'-is unfounded. Second, by referring to Freud's and Marcuse's speculation on 'Eros'-the great unifying energy that preserves all life-as an alternative to the predicament caused by an oppressive civilization, this essay illuminates Erdrich's vision of sustaining and regenerating the Chippewas' tribal life and heritage that center on the embracing power of love reified in Lulu and Marie. Their undying energy consolidating their communal love and ties, despite the destructive, oppressive colonialist milieu inflicted on the Chippewa Indian reservation, sheds light on the author's politics of 'Eros' predicated tightly upon her historical consciousness.