Coalitions Across the 'Last Frontier': Potential for Collective Voice and Community within White Rural Masculinities

Abstract

In thinking critically about the use of the plural first person in contemporary fiction, there seems to be a hyper-focus on pronoun usage, and though this is certainly a political decision, there seems to be potential in acknowledging the more varied ways to use ‘we’ as a pronoun of resistance. Using David Jauss’s concept of narrative distance, this paper seeks to explore the nuanced ways embodied perspectives can be manipulated in both Joan Chase’s During the Reign of the Queen of Persia and The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka. By situating both racial and feminine bodies across coalitions of difference (Morris), how can the first-person plural reflect the fracturing and intersectionality of identities? And, considering a white-washed, colonizing version of Alaskan history, one fraught with racial amnesia, what is the potential for anxieties about race, urban, and the feminine, especially in terms of the ‘other’ (Said)? This essay seeks to ask questions about why might a writer might choose to use the first-person plural perspective, and serves as a defense in considering how craft conversations must necessarily be bound up in issues of inequity, historical amnesia, and white settler-colonial legacies in the ‘Last Frontier.’