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Orange Is the New Red

ous” (Canfield and Greenblatt). Orange has been lauded as “the luminary who will reignite the Native American literary movement” (Woronzoff), the mastermind of a rare “literary hit” (Grey)—a “new kind of Native American epic” (Whitton) sure to usher in “an exciting new era for Native American fiction” (Woronzoff). But if Orange is in fact the ambassador to a new field of American Indian literature, is there any “there there”—and where, exactly, is it? The title of the novel, which is set in Orange’s presentday Oakland, California, is drawn ostensibly from Gertrude Stein’s famous pronouncement “There’s no there there,” which has largely been understood as an expression of disappointment at seeing her idyllic childhood home torn down and built over. Like Stein, though, the Cheyenne and Arapaho author isn’t exactly commenting on the disturbing vacancies created by industrial capitalism; nor is he decrying the modern city in general, or Oakland in particular. Instead, and rather unlike his literary foremother, Orange seems to both eulogize and resurrect what remains in the rubble of removal—both in Oakland and in Native communities throughout North America. But many of the book’s glowing reviews have overplayed the novelty of an American Indian writer emerging from an unexpected place—as if we did not already have a robust archive of Indigenous authors writing searingly for decades about urban exile, cultural alienation, and postmodern malaise. Orange’s message may have been a revelation to mainstream American readers, but it did not surprise those of us paying attention to Indigenous writing of the past century or more. Responses to Orange’s stylistic achievement have been similarly bemusing but also revealing. The title of a prominent New York MELANIE BENSON TAYLOR , professor of