Abel, Jordan: Empty Spaces (HB)

Yale University Press, hardcoverPublication Date: February 6, 2024Publisher Marketing: A hypnotic and mystifying exploration of land and legacy, investigating what it means to be an intergenerational, Indigenous survivor of Residential Schools Jordan Abel's new work grows out of the groundbreaking visual expression in his recently published NISHGA, a book that combined nonfiction with photography, concrete poetry, and literary inquiry. Whereas NISHGA integrated descriptions of the landscape from James Fenimore Cooper's settler classic The Last of the Mohicans into visual pieces, Empty Spaces reinscribes those words on the page itself, and in doing so subjects them to bold rewritings. Reimagining the nineteenth-century text from the contemporary perspective of an urban Nisga'a person whose relationship to land and traditional knowledge and spiritual traditions was severed by colonial violence, Abel attempts to answer his research question of what it means to be Indigenous without access