"In this dissertation, I introduce and define my new term, story(ality), which requires refocused attention on the truths available through nonfiction stories told, written, and performed in a contact zone, which is a social space where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other. By Professor Joanna Durczak (Maria Curie-Skłodowska University ) View from the Concrete Shore is a book carefully and lucidly argued it draws on a wealth of current literary and cultural criticism, from Paula Gunn Allen’s to Zygmunt Bauman’s yet most importantly, it brings to light Native American authors’ determination to praise Indian survival in unexpected places and to champion Indigenous peoples’ role as America’s co-custodians. In the cities, revisioned as “urban Turtle Islands,” various forms of domination come to be questioned and defied, Indian identity is reinterpreted, dynamized and modernized, even as its roots are reembraced, while the urban space itself is re-appropriated through Indian presence, myth, and storytelling, or via visions of a pan-American Indigenous revolution. The author’s special focus in the book is on the reconceptualization of the conventional notion of “Indian Country” (as circumscribed by the boundaries of Indian reservations) which inevitably takes place in Vizenor’s, Silko’s, and Alexie’s fiction, as they introduce their readers to the world of urban multi-tribal communities and urban trickster heroes. Like the historians who, a decade earlier, had revolutionized American thinking about the country’s history by finally acknowledging the Native American view of it “from the shore,” these three writers, in their books about urban Indians, challenged contemporary assumptions about Indian identity, the demise of tribal cultures, and the Indian’s place in modern society precisely by assuming as their vantage point the urban or “concrete shore.” The various psychological, political, and artistic ramifications of their choice of perspective are the subject of Ewelina Bańka’s rich and rewarding critical study View from the Concrete Shore. Towards the end of the twentieth century, Native American writers Gerald Vizenor, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Sherman Alexie began to populate their fiction–in defiance of the American reading public’s expectations–with Indian characters who were not only contemporary rather than historical, but also city- rather than reservation-based.
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