"Paleo-Narratives and White Atavism, 1898-2015" (original) (raw)
Related papers
Settler Colonial Studies, 2020
This article reads naturalist portrayals of “post-frontier” frontiers by Frank Norris and Jack London, two key turn-of-the-twentieth- century US literary naturalists, for their chronotopic engagement with the temporal logics and phenomenological orientations that underwrite US settler colonialism. Despite its 1890 “closure,” the concept of the frontier remained central to the ongoing enactment of US settler colonialism around the turn of the twentieth century, and it remains so to this day. This article argues that Norris and London’s naturalist aesthetics support the US settler state’s biopolitics of white ascendance, racialized death, and Native elimination through narratives of white settler death. By considering texts whose narratives appear to contradict the white masculine triumphalism that literary critics often stress in readings of naturalist frontier fiction, I trace how texts including McTeague (1899), The Call of the Wild (1903), and “To Build a Fire” (1908) mobilize US literary naturalism’s evolutionary and typological representational idiom to stage critiques of the racial and genocidal logics of US settler colonialism. Ultimately, these critiques uniquely help to consolidate the phenomenological orientations that underwrite US settler biopolitics: Norris and London’s narratives of white settler death turn the representation of white settler death into a source of (white) settler futurity.
The Poetics of Settler Fatalism: Responses to Ecocide from within the Anthropocene
Pivot: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies and Thought, 2019
It is impossible to think today, without thinking of the Anthropocene. As biospheres are pushed ever-closer towards exhaustion, collapse, and/or radically inhospitable transmutations, there is a simultaneous explosion of work striving to represent and understand this epoch. However, the Anthropocene should not be thought in isolation from other social, political, and ecological processes. In this paper, I investigate the Anthropocene’s intersection with settler colonialism. Of particular interest to this paper are the metaphorical and narrative accounts about wastelanded spaces; that is, how meaning is ascribed to the local manifests of the Anthropocene as they are birthed on colonized territories. I ask what sort of futurities or recuperations are imagined as extant within the Anthropocene; in particular, whether possibilities for anti-colonial futures are imagined as existing within or emerging from wastelanded spaces. I investigate Richard-Yves Sitoski’s (settler) brownfields. In this intensely located book of poetry—which Sitoski describes as a “poetic ‘autogeography” of Owen Sound”—identifying the presence of what I call settler fatalism in the face of the Anthropocene and its attendant brownfields. I suggest this fatalism is brought about by a melancholic attachment to the processes of wastelanding that are endemic to settler colonization. The final section of this paper contrasts the settler fatalism of Sitoski with the still ambivalent, though more generative poetry of Liz Howard (Ashinaabek). I suggest that Howard’s Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent approaches the Anthropocene not as a terminal epoch, but as what Donna Haraway calls “a boundary event”.
Crossing Divides: Archaeology as Long-Term History
Crossing Divides: Archaeology as Long-Term History. In Across a Great Divide: Continuity and Change in Native North American Societies, 1400-1900, 2010
Mitchell, Mark D. and Laura L. Scheiber (2010) Crossing Divides: Archaeology as Long-Term History. In Across a Great Divide: Continuity and Change in Native North American Societies, 1400-1900, edited by Laura L. Scheiber and Mark D. Mitchell, pp. 1-22. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. Few cultural and political events have stimulated as much debate among social scientists as the Columbian Quincentennial. For archaeologists especially, the 1992 commemoration of Columbus’s landfall in the New World provoked a wide-ranging and critical debate. At first, the discussion was largely reflexive and focused on the political context of archaeological practice, on the responsibilities of archaeologists to descendant communities, and on the disciplinary divide separating history from anthropology. More recently, attention has turned to the development of new theoretical approaches for studying colonial interaction, inspired especially by political economy and poststructural social theory. The result has been a surge of interest in post-1500 indigenous communities and a rapidly growing body of archaeological knowledge about the ways in which the processes of European colonialism were integrated, accommodated, resisted, and transformed by native peoples. But even as research on colonial interaction has become more prominent and methodologically sophisticated, many scholars have continued to rely on untested conceptual frameworks for understanding how and why native societies changed after the advent of European. Despite evidence of their inadequacy, the same conventional explanations for the course of post-1500 culture change continue to be given. American Indians and First Nations peoples continue to be portrayed as primitive environmentalists, living lightly on the land in a homeostatic state of nature, even as evidence mounts that they were responsible for shaping the ecosystems encountered by the first European settlers. Archaeologists continue to assume that European technologies rapidly and decisively replaced indigenous technologies, despite evidence for the persistent use of stone and bone tools. Historians acknowledge the impact of native actions on colonial society, but the dominance of the colonists, with their more powerful weapons, their superior disease resistance, and their outsized avarice, is seldom questioned. And although the triumphal story of European progress has lost some of its luster, the teleology at its heart can still be found in the assumption of inevitable cultural collapse that infuses research on recent native peoples. In part, the ongoing reliance on conventional narratives of change reflects the asymmetrical outcome of colonial interaction. In the end, the result was decisive: millions of native people dead, the survivors driven from their homes, forced to assimilate, forced to deny their heritage and their identity. Many of their descendants now live in crushing poverty. The consequences for native peoples have been so overwhelming that many scholars have believed they also were inevitable, and this has discouraged critical In part, the ongoing reliance on conventional narratives of change reflects the asymmetrical outcome of colonial interaction. In the end, the result was decisive: millions of native people dead, the survivors driven from their homes, forced to assimilate, forced to deny their heritage and their identity. Many of their descendants now live in crushing poverty. The consequences for native peoples have been so overwhelming that many scholars have believed they also were inevitable, and this has discouraged critical research on the course of colonial interaction. But the assumption of inevitability merely poses questions: On what evidence are conventional narratives based? Who produced them and when? In this chapter, we explore the origins of these narratives, consider why they have endured, and introduce approaches to challenge them.
Critique d’art, 2022
A review article on "The Dawn of Everything". The Dawn of Everything,1 the fruit of a long-term dialogue between the anthropologist David Graeber—who, sadly, died shortly before this book came out—and the archaeologist David Wengrow, barely one year after its launch is already a publishing phenomenon: besides its commercial success and not only in the English-speaking world, I cannot recall another occasion in the recent and not so recent past when a book, written mostly for the general public, has generated so much debate within the scholarly community.