Decolonizing American: Native Americans in Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon

Abstract

Mason & Dixon provides the most sustained engagement with Native Americans in Pynchon’s fiction to date. This article offers an analysis of Pynchon’s writing of Native Americans that participates in attempts to reassess the potential for literature classified as postmodern to effectively and ethically engage with racial issues. I begin by discussing the manner in which Pynchon critiques Western knowledge production—and, specifically, the captivity narrative form—while negotiating his own position as a canonical white male author and descendent of pre-republican settlers. The second part of the article suggests that Pynchon does not stop at this critique of Western knowledge production, arguing—via the theoretical work of Aníbal Quijano, Walter Mignolo, and Gerald Vizenor—that his approach in this novel extends to an active valorization of the distinct modes of knowledge production of colonized peoples and a promotion of routes to their cultural survivance.