Destabilizing structuralism in Pauline Melville’s The Ventriloquist’s Tale

This chapter examines the way in which Melville's novel challenges the ongoing influence of classical anthropological discourses of kinship and indigeneity via its parodic representation of Lévi-Strauss, its exploration of the incest taboo, and its interrogation of the power of language and writing. The novel offers several intersecting stories which demonstrate the imbrication of discourses of kinship with those of nation, and it offers instead practices and understandings of kinship which are both Amerindian and diasporic. It stakes a claim for indigenous presence and participation in the cultures of the Black Atlantic, thereby challenging theories that define diaspora against indigeneity. Rather than capitulating to the anthropological claim that kinship is a structural basis for culture, the novel offers an alternative understanding of kinship based not on genealogy or sexual bonds, but on shared labour within a complete ecosystem.