![]() We do so via close-readings of three of Tony's encounters in the novel: with himself, with an able-bodied, non-Native interlocutor who interrogates his cultural and bodymind alterity, and with his grandmother. We argue that Orange (Cheyenne and Arapaho) explores how the disabled Native bodymind is always under the surveillance of the present colonial eye. ![]() Abstract: At the start of Tommy Orange's There There, Cheyenne child Tony Loneman peers into his television screen and considers a playground taunt: "Why's your face look like that?" Confronted with his reflection, he discovers the "Drome"-the way fetal alcohol syndrome has contoured his body, "the way history lands on a face." The novel ends with another question from Tony: "Grandma, what are we?" With these pillared concerns-the "why" of nonnormative embodiment and the "what" of cultural identity-There There invites us to consider the ways that Indigeneity and disability are constitutive of one another. ![]()
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