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Searching for Yellowstone
Race, Gender, Family, and Memory in the Postmodern West
Norman K. Denzin
255 pp. / 6.00 x 9.00 / May, 2008
Hardback (978-1-59874-319-7)
Paperback (978-1-59874-320-3)
  
Related Interest
  - Communications & Media Studies
  - Cultural Studies & the Arts
  - Ethnic Studies
  - History
  - Native American and Indigenous Studies
  - Qualitative Research & Methods

Yellowstone. Sacagawea. Lewis & Clark. Transcontinental railroad. Indians as college mascots. All are iconic figures, symbols of the West in the Anglo-American imagination. Well-known cultural critic
"I read this book in one thoroughly engrossed sitting and immediately began planning a family trip to Yellowstone...It is a tribute to Denzin’s fine performative text that he captures in his memories, his performance scripts, his recovered historical records and art, and in his analyses of the visual and visceral representations of the West the curious admixture of what I elsewhere call “the plural present.” For there is in the discourses creating the new Old West a revisioning of the past made more inclusive by these counter-narratives, more democratic in their depictions of “what happened,” and more accountable for it. "

- H.L. "Bud" Goodall, author of Writing Qualitative Inquiry, at HLGoodall.com

"Denzin has produced an unusual work on the production and performance of Native American archetypes, specifically as they intersect with the history of Yellowstone National Park and with Denzin's own personal history. Denzin's idea of a "critical performative pedagogy" is a product of his background as an ethnologist, cultural critic, and leading authority on qualitative research. Students and scholars in areas such as cultural theory, American Studies, and ethnic studies, as well as readers interested in cultural memoir, will appreciate his interdisciplinary approach. Perhaps most valuable for classroom instruction will be the chapters that present concepts in the form of short plays, which will permit students to interact with the text and "own" the material through performance. Summing Up: Recommended. "

- H. Corbett, Northeastern University, CHOICE

Norman Denzin interrogates each of these icons for their cultural meaning in this finely woven work. Part autoethnography, part historical narrative, part art criticism, part cultural theory, Denzin creates a postmodern bricolage of images, staged dramas, quotations, reminiscences and stories that strike to the essence of the American dream and the shattered dreams of the peoples it subjugated.



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