While new modernist scholars are generally keen to recover and integrate the tradition’s marginalized voices, its implements for doing so remain relatively crude. As some critics have argued, the “pluralizing of modernisms” is not sufficient without a more granular accounting of the mutually constitutive developments of race/racism and modernism writ large. More supple instruments for reading race into modernism have thus acknowledged settler colonialism and racial capitalism as the underlying, instigating features of both modernity as a historical process and modernism as the intellectual and cultural responses to inhabiting its conditions and institutions. Summoning Indigeneity into modernism’s operations frameworks forces us to read against the typical grain of alterity, resistance, or transcendence. This chapter surveys the state of such field-shifting projects while arguing for further innovations that would more radically place – and deconstruct – the idea of “Indigeneity” within the crucible of modernism.

The category of Civil War literature is not bounded by historical designation or lived experience; instead, this genre encompasses a broad range of reflections and reconstructions concerning the legacy imparted by the war. Beginning with the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, contemporary evaluations of the civil rights movement mobilize competing logics of Civil War memory. These versions of Civil War memory take shape in both personal and political registers, the subjective nature of which simultaneously confounds and perpetually renews understandings of the past. Three developments occurred in the 1950s and 1960s that brought such contradictory remembrance to light: the desegregation of public schools via Brown v. Board of Education, the commemoration of the Civil War’s centennial anniversary, and the deaths of the last remaining Civil War veterans. This final event characterizes the relevant work produced in both the civil rights movement and our contemporary moment, as writers continuously work to preserve, alter, or resist their ancestors’ history in ways informed by the interests and conflicts of the present.

Born Callie Russell Porter in Indian Creek, Texas, Katherine Anne Porter cultivated an elaborate fiction of genteel southernness: she adopted the name of her Kentucky-born grandmother, along with an apocryphal genealogy of illustrious ancestors and landed gentry. Yet Porter, who rarely lived in the South or even in Texas, would claim other home spaces throughout her life - or, more accurately, her stake in a southern narrative would emerge only circuitously, by way of alternative geographies and narratives in which she identified variously with the elite and the dispossessed. She eventually imported a nativist southern identity that bore the traces of a much deeper American chronicle and called frequently upon an Indigenous motif to both account for and ameliorate the anxieties of dispossession. In Porter’s fiction, an Indigenous frame narrative provides a tempting window onto a reorienting, and finally mythical, humanity unscathed by modernity’s ills. Her long career would bear the traces of an entwined southern-Indigenous imaginary steeped in the lessons and vexations of early American settler colonialism.