Prof. Harry Brown Publishes Injun Joe's Ghost

February 27, 2005

February 27, 2005, Greencastle, Ind. - Harry J. Brown, assistant professor of English at DePauw University, is the author of Injun Joe's Ghost: The Indian Mixed-Blood in American Writing. It is published by University of Missouri Press, which mentions Professor Brown's DePauw affiliation on its Web site and notes that he "is a coauthor of 'The Native American in Short Fiction' in the Saturday Evening Post."

A synopsis of the book asks: "What does it mean to be a 'mixed-blood,' and how has our understanding of this term changed over the last two centuries? What processes have shaped American thinking on racial blending? Why has the figure of the mixed-blood, thought too offensive for polite conversation in the nineteenth century, become a major representative of twentieth-century native consciousness? In Injun Joe's Ghost, Harry J. Brown addresses these questions within the interrelated contexts of anthropology, U.S. Indian policy, and popular fiction by white and mixed-blood writers, mapping the evolution of 'hybridity' from a biological to a cultural category. Brown traces the processes that once mandated the mixed-blood's exile as a grotesque or criminal outcast and that have recently brought about his ascendance as a cultural hero in contemporary Native American writing."

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