Ever since Tommy Orange’s novel There There was published in 2018, Native American urban experience has been pointed out as the novel’s crux. The characters in the novel are Native American but most of them feel estranged from the community since they do not live on reservations, whereby the general implication is that reservations have become ossified as identity markers for many Native Americans. This paper aims to analyze how the novel’s characters use urban areas to create spaces of belonging, thus debunking the myth of the “reservation Indian”. Aided by Edward Soja’s theories on Thirdspace and Robert Tally’s theory of topophrenia, the paper discusses regional powwows, non-profit organizations, American Indian cultural centers, and digital storytelling/narrativization as specific examples of the subject’s awareness of space, their engagement and inscription into space through the practices mentioned above.

The most prominent concerns of contemporary British literature have been reserved for the revision of tradition and history and contestation of metanarratives through historiographic metafiction and historiographic metadrama. Liz Lochhead’s works are abundant in elements of historiographic metadrama which Lochhead uses to rewrite (hi)stories from a different angle, especially (hi)stories involving famous women and their position in the society, as is the case with Blood and Ice and Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off. Blood and Ice focus on Mary Shelley’s process of writing her novel Frankenstein while Mary Queen of Scots got her Head Chopped Off presents Mary Queen of Scots and Elizabeth I in the light of their strained relations. Pertaining to Blood and Ice, the aim of this paper is to discuss the position of MaryShelley as a woman artist surrounded by Romanticists such as P.B. Shelley and Lord Byron and their liberal humanist ideology which shows great indebtedness to the patriarchal metanarrative. With regards to Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off, the paper examines MaryStuart and Elizabeth I’s roles as women and monarchs, masculinity-femininity dichotomy surrounding the queens, the problematics of their historical representation, as well as the danger of their mythologization. The analysis of the elements of historiographic metadrama in the two plays shows that they are examples of ‘herstories’ that dismantle male-centered narratives as imposed rather than natural.

Mind colonization has been a burning issue in the last few decades in the fields of science and humanities. It is argued that mind colonization of the indigenous populations has been conducted via education and language in the mission of ‘civilizing’ since education and language carry culture specific sets of meaning, including knowledge and truth which condition our perception of the world. Zitkala-Ša is one of the earliest Native American authors and activists who sought to subvert the epistemological hierarchy imposed through mind colonization. Zitkala-Ša’s autobiographical collection of short stories titled American Indian Stories (1921) documents her boarding school experience and the acquisition of the colonizer’s education and language. The present paper seeks to address mind colonization through language and education on the example of Zitkala-Ša’s American Indian Stories relying on a number of theories and approaches. The paper also reflects on the importance of Zitkala-Ša mastery of the colonizer’s language