Negotiating Tradition and Modernity in Louise Erdrich’s The Bingo Palace: A Postcolonial Study

Abstract

Louise Erdrich’s The Bingo Palace (1994) offers a profound exploration of the tensions between Indigenous  tradition and capitalist modernity in contemporary Native American life. Set in a North Dakota Ojibwe community  during the rise of tribal casino culture, the novel dramatizes the cultural, spiritual, and psychological consequences  of economic modernization in a postcolonial context. Drawing upon Homi K. Bhabha’s concepts of hybridity,  liminality, ambivalence, and the “Third Space,” this paper examines how Erdrich constructs identity as a negotiated and evolving process rather than a fixed cultural inheritance.