Review of \u3ci\u3eRed Matters : Native American Studies\u3c/i\u3e By Arnold Krupat

A reviewer of Red Matters might reasonably expect a work with the post-colon title Native American Studies to foreground Native intellectual voices or the voices of Native and nonnative scholars who work in the field and publish in the field\u27s journals and to privilege indigenous critical perspectives. The reviewer might have some apprehension, however, that Krupat would say he or she was provincial or a back to the blanket scholar. The title, nevertheless, is part of a broad deception, for though red matters in Red Matters, non-indigenous critical perspectives and Western and non-Native intellectual, cultural, and historical traditions matter more. In his demonstration of the cosmopolitan critic\u27s worldliness and his expertise in the translation of Other knowledges, there is in the work a persistent critical turn away from intellectuals and scholars in the field of Native Studies who rely on indigenous critical perspectives grounded in specific tribal, cultural, historical, and literary contexts. Though Native Studies might not be the only field in which a scholar can implicitly claim that study in other fields will provide the most enlightened insights, the transgression is particularly egregious when non-Natives and scholars who privilege Western or non-Native critical perspectives already dominate the field. Red Matters reinforces exclusive academic standards for what constitutes valid intellectual and critical work, and the cosmopolitan critic affirms the colonial privilege of telling the natives that he knows what is valuable, important, and relevant about their cultural productions. In addition, the critical foundation of Red Matters rests on an intellectual civilization and savagism binary. The cosmopolitan critic is worldly, sophisticated, rational, an expert in many fields, and a friend of the Indian. He functions as a well-organized bricoleur, while Native writers struggle to communicate: Vizenor does not define his terms clearly; Cook-Lynn is badly confused ; Alexie ends some of his stories, Krupat notes in a chapter on Indian rage, in infuriatingly ambiguous and unsatisfying ways; and Womack is, apparently, incapable of matching Krupat\u27s cosmopolitan sophistication. Red Matters is not a work of Native American Studies, but a work of Cosmopolitan Studies or what we might call Compassionate Colonialism in an intellectual, critical, and academic sense. Therefore, while the book might make red matter in postcolonial, borderlands, or subaltern studies, for many scholars in Native Studies who do not need someone telling them in 2003 that red matters, Red Matters likely won\u27t matter much