Unreasonable Expectations

Martin Cruz Smith writes mystery novels. Although he is reputedly of Pueblo and Yaqui ancestry, his inclusion among prolific Native American writers often seems overlooked. His The Indians Won (1970) anticipates an alternate history of the Cold War if the United States had failed to subdue the tribes of the Plains after the Custer debacle. But his subsequent writing did not foreground Indian themes.

Jorge Luis Borges challenges the expectations that come along in efforts to define national literature, or that of a racial group.

I wish to note another contradiction: the nationalists pretend to venerate the capacities of the Argentine mind but wish to limit the poetic exercise of that mind to a few humble local themes, as if we Argentines could only speak of neighborhoods and ranches and not of the universe.
"The Argentine Writer and Tradition," in Selected Non-Fictions, 424

Because what I know of Argentine literature is limited to Borges, this lecture stimulates my thinking about other literatures: American, American Indian, Pacific Northwest Regional, ...

Snippets

Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Non-Fictions (1999) sits in a certain room of my house where I spend a lot of time waiting. By the end of 2010 I should have finished reading it through in one to five minute segments. There I read this morning the passage I read two days ago, being reminded anew of a passage in another book completed two weeks ago.

Borges' note on method:

I let them talk; I carefully avoided formulating questions that might suggest determined answers.
Borges, "A History of the Tango," 394

Lembke's critique:

In fact, there was much more wrong with his testimonies than he acknowledged to his readers. In the first place there is [Bob] Greene's [Homecoming (1989)] own leading question: "Were you spat upon?" Had he asked a more neutral question such as, "What were your homecoming experiences?" the veterans' responses would be much more valid.
Jerry Lembcke, The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam (1998), 80