Aesthetics of opposition: the politics of metamorphosis in Gerald Vizenor's Bearheart

Abstract

The Chippewa novelist Gerald Vizenor puts across his interconnected politico-philosophical notions of "survivance" and "terminal creeds" in his early novel, Bearheart. To do so, Vizenor implemented some of the aesthetic strategies of magical realism. He filled his novel with an excessive amount of bizarrely sexual and violent scenes-which turn out to be magical-in order to "upset" the established standards of normality. Moreover, he used American Indian mythic folktales of transformation and metamorphosis, a magical realist technique, to re-shape the cultural and tribal identity in Bearheart's modernized context.