Following her Reconstructing the Native South: American Indian Literature and the Lost Cause, published in 2012, Melanie Benson Taylor's The Indian in American Southern Literature is another seminal monograph situated at the intersection of southern literature and Native studies. After Indian Removal, though American Indians were expelled from the South, their ghosts continue to linger and legacies endure. In southern narratives, Natives have traditionally been either overlooked or marginalized, and, according to Taylor, they are “the almost sacred exception in a field of largely discredited and dismantled expectionalisms” (4). To change the situation, historians and literary critics have endeavoured to recentre the regional narratives on the Indian habitants, only to be mired in a stalemate of either “settler colonialism” or “antiblackness” (8). In a departure from previous models, the author adopts a dialectical and intersectional approach, focussing on twentieth-century white southern fiction, a lens through which one can examine how Indigenous Americans and the South are entwined in terms of economy, identity, modernity, capitalism, racialism, and materialism. Through close reading and placing the texts in wide historical and literature contexts, Taylor's new book offers a special angle to observe not only the Indigeneity in southern white literature but also the southernness in the constructions of Native alterity.

Taylor's study is split into three chapters, each of which is devoted to one white southern author. In the opening chapter, Taylor focusses primarily on the Native characters in William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha world. Rather than one-dimensional, flat, and stationary, they are, as Taylor suggests, dynamic – developing from “stereotypical to sentimental” (63) – dialectical – being both the agent and the victim of the modern capitalist system – and dualistic – signifying both “the primordial and the progressive” (88). Highlighting Katherine Anne Porter's criticism of religious intolerance and cognizance of the violent similarities between settler colonialism and Indian Removal, in chapter 2 Taylor reveals that Porter's ambivalent Indian characters are represented as the bewitching spirit relieving the South of the anxieties caused by materialism and as the South's “evacuated hope for a rebirth that will never come” (151). The study ends with a careful reading of contemporary southern writer Barry Hannah's Native American figures, mostly from the West, which on the one hand are the paradoxical force deconstructing the dyad of the North and the South, yet unite the binaries of the black and white, Confederate and Union, and on the other hand serve as the spiritual mentor for his southern characters as well as the spectres that “instigate the torment of his white protagonists” (204).

Throughout the study, refreshingly and innovatively, the subject in question – take Taylor's investigation of Faulkner's Indian characters, for instance – is not solely confined to the real Indigenous, like full-blooded Ikkemotubbe and Weddel in the six short stories “A Bear Hunt,” “A Courtship,” “A Justice,” “Lo!”, “Mountain Victory,” and “Red Leaves,” the black Indian Sam Fathers and the part-Indian Boon Hogganbeck in Go Down, Moses, but also the “proxy Indian” (91) Addie Bundren in As I Lay Lying, the “deputy Indian” (92) Will Falls in Flags in the Dust, and the “quasi-Indian” (93) Popeye in If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, who are either whites or blacks, sharing the Indigeneity of alienation, primitiveness, vacancies, and desires. In this way, Taylor de-essentializes the Natives, affirming the fluidity of racial identity, while emphasizing the continuity, commonality, and connection between Indians and non-Indians, Indigeneity and southernness or blackness. Taylor's defining characteristics of Indians are expanded from biological ones to include cultural ones, which, in some sense, provokes readers to reconsider what constitutes “American Indians.”

One noteworthy weakness is that the range covered by the above-mentioned three white fiction writers and their texts seems limited and is not extensive enough to present an impressive and comprehensive picture of the multifarious Indian images in American southern literature. More importantly, there are no southern black or Native writers or texts addressed in the book, although Taylor explains that this deliberate omission is to “avoid oversimplifying, overdetermining, or appearing to privilege nonwhite methods by default” (12). Nevertheless, Taylor's groundbreaking research will encourage further productive explorations and conversations about Indigenous representations in multiethnic southern literature.

In sum, Taylor's study demystifies the southern Indian narratives, successfully furthering her agenda at “building a scholarly archive about ‘real’ Indian presence and persistence in the Southeast” (4). Thought-provoking and insightful, this pioneering study makes an invaluable contribution to the scholarship of the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of Native southern studies, which is highly recommended for those who are interested in southern literature, Native studies, or American studies.