Split-Gut Song examines Toomer’s experimental aesthetics and the difference they made to modern racial representation. Ford’s book considers the tension in Cane between, on the one hand, poetic form, idealism, and hope in the utopian past versus, on the other hand, prose realism, modernity, and a tragic vision of the urban present. Ford has also received an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship for work on a book on race and form in American poetry.

The Indian Chief as Tragic Hero: Native Resistance and the Literatures of America
Gordon Sayre,
associate professor of English

With chapters on seven major resistance struggles, including the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 and the Natchez Massacre of 1729, The Indian Chief as Tragic Hero offers an analysis of not only the tragedies and epics written about leaders such as Metacom, Pontiac, Tecumseh, and Cuauhtemoc, but also their own speeches and strategies, as recorded in archival sources and narratives by adversaries including Hernán Cortés, Antoine-Simon Le Page du Pratz, Joseph Doddridge, Robert Rogers, and William Henry Harrison. Sayre concludes that these tragedies and epics about Native resistance laid the foundation for revolutionary culture and historiography in North America, and that these leaders presented colonizers with a cathartic reproof of past injustices.

The Plains Sioux and U.S. Colonialism from Lewis and Clark to Wounded Knee
Jeffrey Ostler,
professor of history

Professor Jeffrey Ostler won the Western History Association’s Caughey Prize for The Plains Sioux and U.S. Colonialism from Lewis and Clark to Wounded Knee, which revisits Plains Sioux history and offers several convincing revisions of previous studies. Incorporating a breadth of Lakota words and concepts, the author’s overall contribution is a rich cultural study of the Lakota that appeals to both scholars and general readers. Ostler reveals the fissures, continuities, insufficiencies, and power that characterize a century of colonial encounters, and his powerfully narrated history offers crucial lessons for anyone considering the dynamics of colonial domination and resistance in Native North America.

The State Must Be Our Master of Fire: How Peasants Craft Culturally Sustainable Development in Senegal
Dennis Galvan,
associate professor of political science

Over several centuries, the Serer of the Siin region of Senegal developed a complex system of land tenure that resulted in a stable rural society, productive agriculture, and a well-managed ecosystem. Dennis Galvan tells the story of what happened when French colonial rulers, and later the government of the newly independent Senegal, imposed new systems of land tenure and cultivation on the Serer of Siin. Galvan’s book, which was awarded the African Politics Conference Group Best Book Award for 2005, is a skillful autopsy of ruinous Western-style “rational” economic development policy forced upon a fragile, yet self-sustaining, society. It is also an attempt to articulate a better model for change, which Galvan calls “institutional syncretism.”