UC Irvine

Several indigenous writers across the Americas have claimed that their novels can heal people, and their novels thematize indigenous characters becoming healed from symptoms of shame and contempt they experience within the aesthetic field of colonial culture in which bodies emerge in a racialized and gendered hierarchy of more or less legitimate lifestyles. To investigate ways in which these novels attempt to operate decolonially to heal readers from the colonial social aesthetics defining them as more or less worthy of dignity, freedom, or land, this study draws upon work done in affect theory as well as Native American studies to explore the literary techniques the novels deploy to affect readers largely unconsciously, changing their associations of some of the primary affects identified by Silvan Tomkins (shame, disgust, contempt, surprise, interest, joy, etc.) in relation to landscapes and racialized human bodies. Lauren Berlant’s notion of “the good life” as a fundamental fantasy motivating everyday action becomes useful for tracking how the novels’ portrayals of indigenous characters as successful and Westernized characters as pathological work to redefine the good life for readers, affecting

the ways in which readers relate to indigenous values and lifestyle so that a decolonial activist politics can emerge. The study concludes with a discussion of how cosmological frames of destiny act as a counter-balance to the affective framings of the novels to suggest that readers need feel or do nothing at all since decolonialism will unfold on a cosmological level with or without them. How this gambit might work to the decolonial novels’ advantage is explored in connection to recent findings about the primacy of unconscious decision-making in cognitive science, to suggest that affective intervention is prime before conscious decisions to decolonize the good life are possible.