SOURCE: Little, Jonathan. “Beading the Multicultural World: Louise Erdrich's The Antelope Wife and the Sacred Metaphysic.” Contemporary Literature 41, no. 3 (fall 2000): 495-524.

In the following essay, Little focuses on Louise Erdrich's treatment of culture and personal identity in The Antelope Wife, characterizing Erdrich's depiction of both as fluid and continually evolving.

In his recent study of multiculturalism, philosophy, and identity, Satya P. Mohanty criticizes the debilitating insularity of identity politics on the one hand and liberalism's universals on the other. Mohanty charts a postpositivist space between these two positions that combines relativism's antifoundational insights about the historical entanglements of knowledge with liberalism's social hope. Attacking traditional empiricism by stressing subjective knowledge, Mohanty claims that objective knowledge “is based on a conception of human inquiry as profoundly historical and socially mediated; no a priori incorrigible epistemological principles are possible. … we do not only ‘discover’ reality; we ‘make’ it as well...