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Jordan Abel

These poems are all derivations and creative distant readings of James Fenimore Cooper’s novel The Last of the Mohicans. This project is in part inspired by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s argument (in An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States) that Cooper’s novel plays a role in reinventing the colonial origins of the United States, and in creating a narrative that was “instrumental in nullifying guilt related to genocide.” Ultimately, this project seeks to disrupt the colonial logic in the novel by displacing (and reorienting) the text itself in order expose the problematic representation of Indigenous peoples. The project is also deeply inspired by current digital humanities techniques of visualization, machine reading, and algorithmic allocation.
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