Medicine Bundle Indian Sacred Performance and American Literature, 1824-1932 Joshua David Bellin "An excellent book about the way in which performance constitutes (rather than merely reflects) cultural differences between and among Native American and Anglo-American peoples."--Joseph Roach, Yale University "Bellin's important book challenges readers to rethink questions of colonization and acculturation. . . . Highly recommended. "--"Choice" From the 1820s to the 1930s, Christian missionaries and federal agents launched a continent-wide assault against Indian sacred dance, song, ceremony, and healing ritual in an attempt to transform Indian peoples into American citizens. In spite of this century-long religious persecution, Native peoples continued to perform their sacred traditions and resist the foreign religions imposed on them, as well as to develop new practices that partook of both. At the same time, some whites began to explore Indian performance with interest, and even to promote Indian sacred traditions as a source of power for their own society. The varieties of Indian performance played a formative role in American culture and identity during a critical phase in the nation's development. In "Medicine Bundle," Joshua David Bellin examines the complex issues surrounding Indian sacred performance in its manifold and intimate relationships with texts and images by both Indians and whites. From the paintings of George Catlin, the traveling showman who exploited Indian ceremonies for the entertainment of white audiences, to the autobiography of Black Elk, the Lakota holy man whose long life included stints as a dancer in Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, a supplicant in the Ghost Dance movement, and a catechist in the Catholic Church, Bellin reframes American literature, culture, and identity as products of encounter with diverse performance traditions. Like the traditional medicine bundle of sacred objects bound together for ritual purposes, Indian performance and the performance of Indianness by whites and Indians alike are joined in a powerful intercultural knot. Joshua David Bellin is a member of the faculty of La Roche College and the author of "The Demon of the Continent: Indians and the Shaping of American Literature," also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press. 2007 272 pages 6 x 9 ISBN 978-0-8122-4034-4 Cloth $59.95s 39.00 World Rights Literature, Native American Studies, Cultural Studies Short copy: Joshua David Bellin examines the complex issues surrounding Indian sacred performance in its manifold and intimate relationships with texts and images by both Indians and whites.

The Demon of the Continent Indians and the Shaping of American Literature Joshua David Bellin "This work will join such studies as Toni Morrison's "Playing in the Dark," Eric Sundquist's "To Wake the Nations," and Lucy Maddox's "Removals." It is a thoughtful, engaging study."--Priscilla Wald, Duke University "Bellin not only proposes a major and fundamentally new reading of American literature itself, he also writes beautifully."--Barry F. O'Connell, Amherst College In recent years, the study and teaching of Native American oral and written art have flourished. During the same period, there has been a growing recognition among historians, anthropologists, and ethnohistorians that Indians must be seen not as the voiceless, nameless, faceless Other but as people who had a powerful impact on the historical development of the United States. Literary critics, however, have continued to overlook Indians as determinants of American--rather than specifically Native American--literature. The notion that the presence of Indian peoples shaped American literature as a whole remains unexplored. In "The Demon of the Continent," Joshua David Bellin probes the complex interrelationships among Native American and Euro-American cultures and literatures from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. He asserts that cultural contact is at the heart of American literature. For Bellin, previous studies of Indians in American literature have focused largely on the images Euro-American writers constructed of indigenous peoples, and have thereby only perpetuated those images. Unlike authors of those earlier studies, Bellin refuses to reduce Indians to static antagonists or fodder for a Euro-American imagination. Drawing on works such as Henry David Thoreau's "Walden," William Apess' "A Son of the Forest," and little known works such as colonial Indian conversion narratives, he explores the ways in which these texts reflect and shape the intercultural world from which they arose. In doing so, Bellin reaches surprising conclusions: that "Walden" addresses economic clashes and partnerships between Indians and whites; that William Bartram's "Travels" encodes competing and interpenetrating systems of Indian and white landholding; that Catherine Sedgwick's "Hope Leslie" enacts the antebellum drama of Indian conversion; that James Fenimore Cooper and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow struggled with Indian authors such as George Copway and David Cusick for physical, ideological, and literary control of the nation. "The Demon of the Continent" proves Indians to be actors in the dynamic processes in which America and its literature are inescapably embedded. Shifting the focus from textual images to the sites of material, ideological, linguistic, and aesthetic interaction between peoples, Bellin reenvisions American literature as the product of contact, conflict, accommodation, and interchange. Joshua David Bellin is a member of the faculty of La Roche College. 2000 280 pages 6 x 9 ISBN 978-0-8122-3570-8 Cloth $59.95s 39.00 ISBN 978-0-8122-1748-3 Paper $27.50s 18.00 World Rights Literature, Native American Studies, Cultural Studies Short copy: American literature has been deeply shaped by the presence of American Indians.

MYRIAD is a mind-bending time travelling sci-fi thriller that will keep readers guessing to the very end. Agent Miriam Randle works for LifeTime, a private law enforcement agency that undertakes short-term time travel to erase crimes before they occur. Haunted by the memory of her twin brother's unsolved murder at the age of six, Miriam thinks of herself as Myriad-an incarnation of the many lives she's lived in her journeys to rearrange the past. When a routine assignment goes wrong and Miriam commits a murder she was meant to avert, she is thrown into the midst of a conspiracy that reaches to the highest levels of LifeTime. Along with her partner Vax, Miriam flees into the past in an attempt to unravel the truth before LifeTime agents catch up with her. But then her brother's killer reappears, twenty years to the day since he first struck. And he's not through with the twin who survived, not by a long shot.

The canon of popular cinema has long been rife with fantastic tales, yet critical studies have too often expediently mixed the fantasy genre with its kindred science fiction and horror films or dismissed it altogether as escapist fare. "Framing Monsters: Fantasy Film and Social Alienation" reconsiders the cultural significance of this storytelling mode by investigating how films seemingly divorced from reality and presented in a context of timelessness are, in fact, encoded with the social practices and beliefs of their era of production.
Situating representative fantasy films within their cultural moments, Joshua David Bellin illustrates how fantastic visions of monstrous others seek to propagate negative stereotypes of despised groups and support invidious hierarchies of social control. In constructing such an argument, "Framing Monsters" not only contests dismissive attitudes toward fantasy but also challenges the psychoanalytic criticism that has thus far dominated its limited critical study.
Beginning with celebrated classics, Bellin locates "King Kong" (1933) within the era of lynching to evince how the film protects whiteness against supposed aggressions of a black predator and reviews "The Wizard of Oz "(1939) as a product of the Depression's economic anxieties. From there, the study moves to the cult classic animated "Sinbad" Trilogy (1958-1977) of Ray Harryhausen, films rampant with xenophobic fears of the Middle East as relevant today as when the series was originally produced.
Advancing to more recent subjects, Bellin focuses on the image of the monstrous woman and the threat of reproductive freedom found in "Aliens" (1986), "Jurassic Park" (1993), and "Species"(1995) and on depictions of the mentally ill as dangerous deviants in "12 Monkeys" (1996) and "The Cell "(2000). An investigation into physical freakishness guides his approach to "Edward Scissorhands" (1990) and "Beauty and the Beast" (1991). He concludes with a discussion of "X-Men "(2000) and "Lord of the Rings" (2001-2003), commercial giants that extend a recent trend toward critical self-reflection within the genre while still participating in the continuity of social alienation.
Written to enhance rather than undermine our understanding of fantastic cinema, "Framing Monsters" invites filmmakers, critics, and fans alike to reassess this tremendously popular and influential film type and the monsters that populate it.
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