Meet the Moderators: Dr. Andrew Lopenzina
Dr. Andrew Lopenzina is one of the moderators of the panel “Rendering of Native American Images.” Drew Lopenzina is the author of Red Ink: Native Americans Picking up the Pen in the Colonial Period. His work examines the innovative ways in which Native peoples adapted their own literary traditions to meet the demands of print literacy in the colonial milieu. Rather than simply assimilate to the violent imposition of European expectations and norms, indigenous peoples of America used literacy to further their own cultural agendas in an ongoing bid for survivance. Lopenzina has published in a number of books and journals including American Literature and American Quarterly. He is currently writing a book on the life of nineteenth-century Pequot Indian and Methodist minister William Apess. He is professor of early American literature at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, VA. This conference asks the question, “When did we become Americans?” But the answer to that question is as varied and complex as the main events of 1619 themselves. “America” came of being within a divisive and often violent colonial dynamic that sought to exploit imported human labor on the one hand, and dispossess local indigenous populations on the other. These troubling realities of colonialism, in fact, have served to effectively elide “1619” as a date of historical significance from our collective cultural memories. My segment of this discussion will focus on the manner in which images of Native peoples have been used to paper over the cultural and historical narratives America prefers not to tell. Representations of Native Americans, typically produced by and within the dominant culture, continue to contribute to a story that does more to disenfranchise Native community and tradition than actually preserve or honor it. My talk concerns the very local images of colonial figures like John Smith and Pocahontas and begins to unpack how image and narrative bond together to erase more than they reveal about exactly how and when we became Americans.