Mark Rifkin

In Settler Common Sense, Mark Rifkin explores how canonical American writers take part in the legacy of displacing Native Americans. Although the books he focuses on are not about Indians, they serve as examples of what Rifkin calls "settler common sense," taking for granted the legal and political structure through which Native peoples continue to be dispossessed. In analyzing Nathaniel Hawthorne's House of the Seven Gables, Rifkin shows how the novel draws on Lockean theory in support of small-scale landholding and alternative practices of homemaking. The book invokes white settlers in southern Maine as the basis for its ethics of improvement, eliding the persistent presence of Wabanaki peoples in their homeland. Rifkin suggests that Henry David Thoreau's Walden critiques property ownership as a form of perpetual debt. Thoreau's vision of autoerotic withdrawal into the wilderness, though, depends on recasting spaces from which Native peoples have been dispossessed as places of non-Native regeneration. As against the turn to "nature," Herman Melville's Pierre presents the city as a perversely pleasurable place to escape from inequities of land ownership in the country. Rifkin demonstrates how this account of urban possibility overlooks the fact that the explosive growth of Manhattan in the nineteenth century was possible only because of the extensive and progressive displacement of Iroquois peoples upstate. Rifkin reveals how these texts' queer imaginings rely on treating settler notions of place and personhood as self-evident, erasing the advancing expropriation and occupation of Native lands. Further, he investigates the ways that contemporary queer ethics and politics take such ongoing colonial dynamics as an unexamined framework in developing ideas of freedom and justice.

Queerness and Everyday Colonialism in the American Renaissance

Settler Common Sense

Mark Rifkin explores how Indigenous experiences with time and the dominance of settler colonial conceptions of temporality have affected Native peoplehood and sovereignty, thereby rethinking the very terms by which history is created and organized around time by.

Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination

Beyond Settler Time

Daniel Heath Justice

Daniel Heath

Bethany Schneider

This issue shows how a conversation between the interdisciplinary fields of Native American studies and queer studies can generate more complex and nuanced understandings of the U.S. nation-state, of Native peoplehood, and of the roles culture plays in processes of political expression and identification. Recent bans on same-sex marriage within the Cherokee and Navajo nations suggest the importance of charting the relationship between discourses of sexuality and dominant ideologies of political legitimacy. Exploring how marriage, family, homemaking, kinship, personal identity, and everyday experience are linked to legal institutions and public policy, the contributors investigate the complex interweaving of histories of queerness and indigeneity. Challenging operative assumptions in these two fields by putting them into dialogue, the collection opens up new ways of approaching the matrix of settlement, sexuality, and sovereignty. One essay cross- examines the heterosexism of the Cherokee government's outlawing of same-sex marriage by revisiting that culture's traditional embrace of variation. Another essay theorizes the politics of visibility surrounding Native writers whose work takes a queer turn but who do not publicly contest the presumption of their straightness. Several essays address the possibilities and limits of queer theoretical frameworks in conceptualizing the legacies of settler colonialism. The final essay traces the history of gendercide in Native California and argues for the recovery of traditional notions of two-spirit identity within contemporary projects of decolonization.ContributorsLouis Cruz; Sarah Dowling; Qwo-Li Driskill; Janice Gould; Sharon Holland; Daniel Heath Justice; Deborah A. Miranda; Scott Morgensen; Mark Rifkin; Bethany Schneider; Andrea Smith; James Thomas Stevens; Lisa Tatonetti; Craig Womack

Sexuality, Nationality, Indigeneity

In Fictions of Land and Flesh Mark Rifkin explores the impasses that arise in seeking to connect Black and Indigenous movements, turning to speculative fiction to understand those difficulties and envision productive ways of addressing them. Against efforts to subsume varied forms of resistance into a single framework in the name of solidarity, Rifkin argues that Black and Indigenous political struggles are oriented in distinct ways, following their own lines of development and contestation. Rifkin suggests how movement between the two can be approached as something of a speculative leap in which the terms and dynamics of one are disoriented in the encounter with the other. Futurist fiction provides a compelling site for exploring such disjunctions. Through analyses of works by Octavia Butler, Walter Mosley, Nalo Hopkinson, Melissa Tantaquidgeon Zobel, and others, the book illustrates how ideas about fungibility, fugitivity, carcerality, marronage, sovereignty, placemaking, and governance shape the ways Black and Indigenous intellectuals narrate the past, present, and future. In turning to speculative fiction, Rifkin illustrates how speculation as a process provides conceptual and ethical resources for recognizing difference while engaging across it.

Blackness, Indigeneity, Speculation

Fictions of Land and Flesh

Manifesting America explores how Native American and Mexican American writers use various kinds of nonfiction to challenge the ideology of manifest destiny.

The Imperial Construction of U.S. National Space

Manifesting America

What does it mean to say that Native peoples exist in the present? In Beyond Settler Time Mark Rifkin investigates the dangers of seeking to include Indigenous peoples within settler temporal frameworks. Claims that Native peoples should be recognized as coeval with Euro-Americans, Rifkin argues, implicitly treat dominant non-native ideologies and institutions as the basis for defining time itself. How, though, can Native peoples be understood as dynamic and changing while also not assuming that they belong to a present inherently shared with non-natives? Drawing on physics, phenomenology, queer studies, and postcolonial theory, Rifkin develops the concept of "settler time" to address how Native peoples are both consigned to the past and inserted into the present in ways that normalize non-native histories, geographies, and expectations. Through analysis of various kinds of texts, including government documents, film, fiction, and autobiography, he explores how Native experiences of time exceed and defy such settler impositions. In underscoring the existence of multiple temporalities, Rifkin illustrates how time plays a crucial role in Indigenous peoples’ expressions of sovereignty and struggles for self-determination.

Mark Rifkin

Books

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