<i>Seeing Red: Anger, Sentimentality, and American Indians</i> (review)

Indigenous anger has been the subject of recent sociological studies from examinations of anger as a decolonization tool in indigenous peoples’ struggles with settler states to explorations of indigenous perspectives on anger and violence.1 Cari M. Carpenter’s Seeing Red: Anger, Sentimentality, and American Indians turns to a literary mode— sentimentality—to explore articulations of indigenous anger by American Indian women writers. More specifi cally, she turns to nineteenth-century American literary history to examine how early American Indian women writers represented anger in several literary genres, from the sentimental novel to the autobiography, poetry, essays, and public performances between the 1880s and the 1900s. Carpenter’s study traces the intersections of emotional, racial, and gender performances in the works of Alice Callahan (Muscogee/ Creek), Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins (Paiute), and E. Pauline Johnson/ Tekahionwake (Mohawk). Acknowledging that for some Native Studies scholars the use of the sentimentality paradigm may seem suspicious—invoking, among others, Craig Womack’s acerbic criticism of Callahan’s Wynema—Carpenter argues that, by disregarding the potential of a popular genre that Native women writers “manipulated” in their response to Native dispossession, we “dismiss an important aspect of indigenous resistance” (7). She maintains that sentimentality and anger gave the writers in question the opportunity to assert both self and nation: “[S]entimentality is a tactic through which anger may be articulated in the defense of an indigenous nationhood” (15). Anger matters. Indigenous anger matters more, this book suggests, and understanding the role of anger as “both stereotype and resistance tactic” becomes one of Carpenter’s main agendas. To this end, she sees both the “conventional form” and the “ironic counterpart” of sentimental discourse as productive ways to articulate indigenous anger (5). For Carpenter, anger is “a system of relations that always communicate power: a mark of the connection (or distance) between self and community that is shaped by race and gender” (17). Using a variety of critical methods, from “Native American studies of anger” (10) to feminist theories of anger, tracing historical constructions of anger in the nineteenth century, Carpenter envisions anger as a place of connection rather than difference between white women reformers and Native women at the end of the nineteenth century. However, the critic examines not only instances of indigenous