"Sovereign Flows: Indigenous Form and the Work of Relation" A Manuscript Talk by Professor Christopher Pexa

This talk draws from Sovereign Flows, a book-in-progress by Professor Christopher Pexa that considers literary form like some Indigenous lifeways conceive of water: as a living force that enables relation. Reading Sherwin Bitsui's Flood Song and Tommy Orange’s Wandering Stars, Professor Pexa traces what he calls a flood aesthetic—poetry and prose that stack and spill, letting things touch and accumulate until they begin to move together. In Bitsui’s work, drops of Diné language fall down the page before rising into a torrent that gathers uranium mines, corn pollen, ceremony, and memory into the same current. In Orange’s novel, Sand Creek, a prison in Florida, and present-day Oakland move together in metonymic simultaneity, drawing us into lives that unfold across overlapping times and places. Professor Pexa explores how these works place readers inside thickening currents of relation, where reading becomes implication and obligation—unsettling the idea that literature stands apart from the lives it gathers or that we can remain untouched by the ground beneath us.