Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association
The (Re)production of Misery and the Ways of Resistance
October 8-11, 2015
Toronto, Canada

4:00 pm – 5:45 pm
Panel 094. States of Injury
Sheraton Centre, Forest Hill
Chair: Amy Farrell, Dickinson College
Papers:
J.C. Sibara, Colby College (ME)
Bare Life? Slow Death? Premature Disability? Theorizing Imperial Injury in Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead
Maria O’Malley, University of Nebraska, Kearney (NE)
The Aesthetic Response to Torture in Emily Dickinson’s Poetry
Robert Mousseau, Carleton University (Canada)
Reading in Reaction to Misery: Observing Therapeutic Responses to Social Tragedy in Dave Eggers’s Literature
Sören Fröhlich, University of California, San Diego (CA)
Blood Writ: Tissue Economies and the Misery of Parasitic in Sherman Alexie’s The Sin Eaters

Abstract:

Despite acclaim for Sherman Alexie’s oeuvre, “The Sin Eaters” remains under-studied. Bridging genres, this short story draws on contemporary science fiction like Derek Bell’s “The Space Traders,” on testaments of Native American genocide, as well as on texts about the Holocaust. It tells a fictional witness account of the horrors during the removal and internment of all full-blood Native Americans by the U.S. government. Their isolation prisons turn out to be medical factories for the extraction of bodily fluids from the bodies of Native Americans for the benefit of Anglo Americans. Recently, French scholar Diane Sabatier argued that this story combined an allegorical engagement with Otherness. Critic Juda Bennett reads it as an exploration of the moral and social implications of the prison-industrial complex. This tension between formal-aesthetic and socio-political engagement results from Alexie’s use of narrative framing that fuses Native American and dystopian narrative in blood.
Alexie establishes a parasitic symbiosis of pain between Native and Anglo bodies through blood. He evokes contradictory and laden cultural associations of blood. Allusions to genocidal campaigns, blood quantum laws, state-sponsored eugenic programs, and the internment and torture of ethnic minorities trace the awful richness of the Native American experience. Imprisonment, dehumanization, and medical torture of Native bodies at the hands of the U.S. government destroy this wealth of associations. Alexie also stresses contemporary medico-capitalist exploitation of blood, however. As Catherine Waldby and Robert Mitchell explain, cultural and ethical considerations of blood become insignificant in the face of contemporary symbiotic, global flows of blood-as-capital. The blood of Alexie’s protagonist collapses from culture to biology when the medical substance threatens to erase his cultural identity—the extraction of blood robs “certain words” from him.
I therefore focus on Alexie’s critique of global blood markets. As the government reduces full-blooded bodies to bodies full of blood, therapeutic process overrides lived experience. Read against the boom of global blood markets and blood product companies, Alexie’s story rises beyond a parable about Otherness and a story about capitalist incarceration. In his view, vampiric capitalism tortures indigenous cultures to satisfy an unquenchable thirst for blood. The extraction of precious raw materials fuses psychological and physical pain in an echo of contemporary biopolitical global blood markets. The parasitic flow of liquid capital, our need for blood today, mobilizes immense economic and social activity—and pain. This misery is decidedly non-fictional. Black blood markets pose an existential threat to many indigenous cultures today. Government policies that govern blood donations continue to discipline donors and police the national body while industrial processes of blood component production by medico-capitalist conglomerates rob all cultures.
Without meaningful discussions of who benefits from global blood markets, of whom they threaten, and of what happens with that blood, the Red Cross and the American Association of Blood Banks will continue to rob words from us. Alexie’s story urges us to intervene in the negotiation of biopolitical blood economies and to reclaim relationships and communities stolen under the auspices of therapeutic progress.