Dangerously Free: Outlaws and Nation-making in Literature of the Indian Territory

In this dissertation, I examine how literary representations of outlaws and outlawry have contributed to the shaping of national identity in the United States. I analyze a series of texts set in the former Indian Territory (now part of the state of Oklahoma) for traces of what I call “outlaw rhetorics,” that is, the political expression in literature of marginalized realities and competing visions of nationhood. Outlaw rhetorics elicit new ways to think the nation differently—to imagine the nation otherwise; as such, I demonstrate that outlaw narratives are as capable of challenging the nation’s claims to territorial or imaginative title as they are of asserting them. Borrowing from Abenaki scholar Lisa Brooks’s definition of “nation” as “the multifaceted, lived experience of families who gather in particular places,” this dissertation draws an analogous relationship between outlaws and domestic spaces wherein they are both considered simultaneously exempt from and constitutive of civic life. In the same way that the outlaw’s alternately celebrated and marginal status endows him or her with the power to support and eschew the stories a nation tells about itself, so the liminality and centrality of domestic life have proven effective as a means of consolidating and dissenting from the status quo of the nation-state. I introduce my argument with a brief reading of the Oklahoma Diamond Jubilee celebrations in 1982 before turning to the settler-colonial politics of outlawry in my first two chapters’ respective analyses of Charles Portis’s True Grit (1968) and turn-of-the-century narratives of the life of Belle Starr, the so-called “Bandit Queen.” The two remaining chapters take up the invocation of outlaw rhetorics in texts that approach the politics of outlawry from an Indigenous perspective, including Green Grow the Lilacs (1929) by Cherokee poet and playwright R. Lynn Riggs, and three fictional accounts of the life of Ned Christie, so-called “Cherokee outlaw,” by John M. Oskison (1926), Robert J. Conley (1991), and Robby McMurtry (2009). A brief Afterword extends the implications of my argument to political disputes that continue to afflict Oklahoma, and the Cherokee Nation in particular, in the twenty-first century.Ph.D.2018-07-08 00:00:0