[In the review below, Roemer argues that while Manifest Manners is at times repetitive, it is nonetheless a powerful book.]

Manifest Manners comes to us with particular authority. Gerald Vizenor is a literary-cultural critic who is an insider literarily and culturally: he is a respected novelist, an Anishinaabe, and a member of the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota. Vizenor is also a master creator of tricksters in film and fiction.

All this makes for tricky reviewing. Should Manifest Manners be evaluated as a Whitmanesque self-analysis/promotion (his comments on trickster hermeneutics illuminate and privilege his protagonists) or as provocative announcements of Native American viewpoints or as a trickster narrative (including a fictional dialogue with a salamander man) or as a wide-ranging series of literary-cultural meditations and vignettes? Though all four approaches are justifiable, for an American Literature review the latter seems most appropriate, especially since Manifest Means analyzes the creation and implications of representations of Native Americans in fiction and nonfiction.

Vizenor examines these representations in two types of chapters: those that emphasize his basic concepts of oppositional discourses of simulation (chapters one through three and the epilogue) and those that focus on specific simulations (Columbus/discovery [chapter four], Ishi [chapter five], images of casinos [chapter six], and media-created panindian leaders [chapter seven]). Drawing upon Jean Baudrillard, Larzer Ziff, and other critics, the first three chapters define the "manifest manners" (greed, "perverse determinism," racialism) that cause a "literature of domination"—simulations that close and annihilate Native oral histories and stories. Beginning in the late nineteenth century (Luther Standing Bear and Charles Eastman) and continuing through today, the literature of dominance has been opposed by "simulations of survivance": shadows and "natural traces of liberation and survivance in the ruins of representation." Vizenor especially champions "an aesthetic restoration of trickster hermeneutics, the stories of liberation and survivance without the dominance of closure": they emphasize "wonder, chance, coincidence."

To illuminate his concepts, in the early chapters Vizenor offers catalogues of brief excerpts and comments: for example, Jefferson, Parkman, Lynn Andrews, John Bly, Jamake Highwater (dominance); Standing Bear, Eastman, Momaday (survivance). In Chapters four through seven he offers extended illustrations, primarily of simulations of dominance: for instance, the legacies of discovery and naming associated with Columbus and the creation of nostalgic "anti[twentieth-century]-selves" derived from Ishi. In his final extended illustration he examines the "tried simulation[s]" of media-discovered panindian leaders; they are the "kitschymen"—"the resistance enterprises of consumer sun dances."

Occasionally the impact of Vizenor's creative language and mixings of critical models is undercut by a tendency to repeat key phrases like manifest manners too often and to turn his arguments into catalogues of brief excerpts and comments. I also wish that Vizenor had devoted more space to the "warriors of survivance" announced in the book's subtitle. Instead the focus is on examples of the simulations of dominance. Vizenor's rapid-fire collages can, nonetheless, build to powerful summations that bring together apparently disparate elements in illuminating ways. Witness his image of Columbus: he "pursued the marvelous other in the narratives of his time, searched for an eternal haven, landed in the simulations of mother earth, and was discovered, at last, in a constitutional democracy." Many of the summations and collages are in themselves engaging performances of the literature of survivance.