Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
xv
Byrd, Jodi A.. Transit of Empire : Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2011. Accessed September 1, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Created from yale-ebooks on 2017-09-01 08:11:53.
xvi INTRODUCTION
needed to travel. Led by a white dog and the Milky Way, the brothers and the
people traveled for years, always following the direction of the pole. Until
one morning. At sunrise, the brothers awoke to find the pole standing almost
straight upright. Chatah insisted that the pole confirmed that their travels
were done, but Chikasah disagreed and argued that the pole still leaned, that
there was still further to go. After continued debate, the question was put to
the peoplethose who agreed with Chatah would stay and make a life there
as Choctaws, in the lands that would become central Mississippi, and those
who sided with Chikasah would travel further east to finally live in what is
now northern Mississippi. Chickasaw sovereignty is, according to our na-
tional motto, unconquered and unconquerable. It is contrary and stubborn.
But the creases of Chickasaw movement demonstrate how sovereignty is
found in diplomacy and disagreement, through relation, kinship, and inti-
macy. And in an act of interpretation.
To be in transit is to be active presence in a world of relational move-
Byrd, Jodi A.. Transit of Empire : Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2011. Accessed September 1, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Created from yale-ebooks on 2017-09-01 08:11:53.
INTRODUCTION xvii
Byrd, Jodi A.. Transit of Empire : Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2011. Accessed September 1, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Created from yale-ebooks on 2017-09-01 08:11:53.
xviii INTRODUCTION
rhetorics of grief, homeland, pain, terrorism, and security have given rise
to what Judith Butler describes as a process through which the Other be-
comes unreal. The derealization of the Other, Butler writes, means that it
is neither alive nor dead, but interminably spectral. The infinite paranoia that
imagines the war against terrorism as a war without end will be one that jus-
tifies itself endlessly in relation to the spectral infinity of its enemy, regardless
of whether or not there are established grounds to suspect the continuing
operation of terror cells with violent aims. But this process of derealization
that Butler marks in the post-/ grief that swept the United States, one
could argue, has been functioning in Atlantic and Pacific New Worlds since
. As Geonpul scholar Aileen Moreton-Robinson argues, discourses of
security are deployed in response to a perceived threat of invasion and dis-
possession from Indigenous people, and in the process, paranoid patriarchal
white sovereignty manages its anxiety over dispossession and threat through
a pathological relationship to indigenous sovereignty. In the United States,
the Indian is the original enemy combatant who cannot be grieved.
Byrd, Jodi A.. Transit of Empire : Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2011. Accessed September 1, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Created from yale-ebooks on 2017-09-01 08:11:53.
INTRODUCTION xix
Transiting Empire
As metropolitan multiculturalism and dominant postcolonialism promise
the United States as postracial asylum for the world, the diminishing returns
of that asylum meet exactly at the point where diaspora collides with settler
colonialism. Of particular concern is how to theorize the degrees to which
indigenous peoples, settlers, and arrivantsa term I borrow from African
Caribbean poet Kamau Brathwaite to signify those people forced into the
Copyright 2011. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved.
Byrd, Jodi A.. Transit of Empire : Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2011. Accessed September 1, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Created from yale-ebooks on 2017-09-01 08:11:53.
xx INTRODUCTION
over the significations of justice, democracy, law, and terror. Through nine-
teenth- and early twentieth-century logics of territorial rights and con-
quest that have now morphed into late twentieth- and early twenty-first
century logics of civil rights and late capitalism, the United States has used
executive, legislative, and juridical means to make Indian those peoples
and nations who stand in the way of U.S. military and economic desires.
Activating the Indian as a foundational concept within poststructural-
ist, postcolonial, and critical race theories leads to one of the overarching
questions of this book: How might the terms of current academic and po-
litical debates change if the responsibilities of that very real lived condition
of colonialism were prioritized as a condition of possibility?
My use of transit refers to a rare astronomical event, the paired transits
of Venus across the sun, that served in and again in as global mo-
ments that moved European conquest toward notions of imperialist plan-
etarity that provided the basis for Enlightenment liberalism. The impe-
rial planetarity that sparked scientific rationalism and inspired humanist
Byrd, Jodi A.. Transit of Empire : Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2011. Accessed September 1, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Created from yale-ebooks on 2017-09-01 08:11:53.
INTRODUCTION xxi
Byrd, Jodi A.. Transit of Empire : Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2011. Accessed September 1, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Created from yale-ebooks on 2017-09-01 08:11:53.
xxii INTRODUCTION
Byrd, Jodi A.. Transit of Empire : Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2011. Accessed September 1, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Created from yale-ebooks on 2017-09-01 08:11:53.
INTRODUCTION xxiii
Byrd, Jodi A.. Transit of Empire : Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2011. Accessed September 1, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Created from yale-ebooks on 2017-09-01 08:11:53.
xxiv INTRODUCTION
Byrd, Jodi A.. Transit of Empire : Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2011. Accessed September 1, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Created from yale-ebooks on 2017-09-01 08:11:53.
INTRODUCTION xxv
Byrd, Jodi A.. Transit of Empire : Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2011. Accessed September 1, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Created from yale-ebooks on 2017-09-01 08:11:53.
xxvi INTRODUCTION
and sexuality) causes the primary violences of U.S. politics in national and
international arenas, multicultural liberalism has aligned itself with settler
colonialism despite professing the goal to disrupt and intervene in global
forms of dominance through investments in colorblind equality. Simply
put, prevailing understandings of race and racialization within U.S. post-
colonial, area, and queer studies depend upon an historical aphasia of the
conquest of indigenous peoples. Further, these framings have forgotten,
as Moreton-Robinson has argued, that the question of how anyone came
to be white or black in the United States is inextricably tied to the dispos-
session of the original owners and the assumption of white possession.
Calls to social justice for U.S. racialized, sexualized, immigrant, and dias-
poric queer communities that include indigenous peoples, if they are not
attuned to the ongoing conditions of settler colonialism of indigenous
peoples, risk deeming colonialism in North America resolved, if not re-
dressed, two cents for billion dollars.
Byrd, Jodi A.. Transit of Empire : Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2011. Accessed September 1, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Created from yale-ebooks on 2017-09-01 08:11:53.
INTRODUCTION xxvii
Byrd, Jodi A.. Transit of Empire : Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2011. Accessed September 1, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Created from yale-ebooks on 2017-09-01 08:11:53.
xxviii INTRODUCTION
Byrd, Jodi A.. Transit of Empire : Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2011. Accessed September 1, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Created from yale-ebooks on 2017-09-01 08:11:53.
INTRODUCTION xxix
Byrd, Jodi A.. Transit of Empire : Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2011. Accessed September 1, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Created from yale-ebooks on 2017-09-01 08:11:53.
xxx INTRODUCTION
traditions in order to build upon all the allied tools available. Steeped in
anticolonial consciousness that deconstructs and confronts the colonial
logics of settler states carved out of and on top of indigenous usual and ac-
customed lands, indigenous critical theory has the potential in this mode
to oer a transformative accountability.
From this vantage, indigenous critical theory might, then, provide a di-
agnostic way of reading and interpreting the colonial logics that underpin
cultural, intellectual, and political discourses. But it asks that settler, na-
tive, and arrivant each acknowledge their own positions within empire and
then reconceptualize space and history to make visible what imperialism
and its resultant settler colonialisms and diasporas have sought to obscure.
Within the continental United States, it means imagining an entirely dif-
ferent map and understanding of territory and space: a map constituted by
over sovereign indigenous nations, with their own borders and bound-
aries, that transgress what has been naturalized as contiguous territory di-
vided into states. There is always, Aileen Moreton-Robinson writes
of indigenous peoples incommensurablity within the postcolonizing set-
tler society, a subject position that can be thought of as fixed in its inalien-
able relation to land. This subject position cannot be erased by colonizing
processes which seek to position the indigenous as object, inferior, other
and its origins are not tied to migration.
While indigenous scholars such as Aileen Moreton-Robinson and
Copyright 2011. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved.
Byrd, Jodi A.. Transit of Empire : Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2011. Accessed September 1, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Created from yale-ebooks on 2017-09-01 08:11:53.
INTRODUCTION xxxi
Byrd, Jodi A.. Transit of Empire : Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2011. Accessed September 1, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Created from yale-ebooks on 2017-09-01 08:11:53.
xxxii INTRODUCTION
the firmament of the postcolonial is that the two fields arise from vastly
dierent geographical and political terrains, and that the contemporary
forms of the European nation-state [are] a model that does not apply to
the historic transformation of Native American kinship-based communi-
ties under Euro-American imperialism. Another reason for the eclipse,
he speculates, may be the result, at least in part and with a few notable
exceptions, of a resistance to critical theory within Native American stud-
ies itself.
However, indigenous scholars have been theorizing about colonialism
for a while now, although often from the antipodes and ruralities over-
looked by the metropole. Teresia Teaiwa (Banaban/I-Kiribati) makes a
foundational critique that, within postcolonial and diaspora studies, the
indigenous Pacific is not brought to the table as an equal partner in any
conversation about the nature of humanity or society. Teaiwa goes even
further when she asserts that the postcolonial abandons the native.
Often, in the work by white settler scholars located in Australia, Canada,
Byrd, Jodi A.. Transit of Empire : Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2011. Accessed September 1, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Created from yale-ebooks on 2017-09-01 08:11:53.
INTRODUCTION xxxiii
and New Zealand, postcolonial debate occurs at the site they define as set-
tler oppression, where they see themselves caught between the European
metropole and indigenous peoples upon whose lands they reside. Such
a move has prompted Aileen Moreton-Robinson to respond that Australia
is a postcolonizing settler culture, in which the postcolonial settler de-
pends upon a possessive whiteness whose ontological premises are tied to
dispossessing indigenous peoples of home, land, and sovereignty. Within
the global South, scholars such as Gayatri Spivak and Mahasweta Devi,
whose work passionately seeks to address the presence of tribals in India,
can occasionally refract indigenous peoples through the very discourses
their work attempts to disrupt. Spivak, for instance, speaks of indigenous
peoples as the impossible prehistoric pterodactyl, and Mahasweta Devi is
concerned that indigenous peoples in the United States are present only in
the names of places [where] the Native American legacy survives. While
each of these moments are certainly interpretable within the contexts of
their texts, they also demonstrate a colonialist trace that continues to pre-
vent indigenous peoples from having agency to transform the assump-
tions within postcolonial and poststuctrualist conversations, despite the
best work of postcolonial scholars to make room. These colonialist traces
have prompted Cherokee scholar Jace Weaver to observe that postcolonial
studies seems oddly detached when discussing indigenous peoples and
their lives. It often displaysas in the works of Mahasweta Devi about and
Copyright 2011. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved.
Byrd, Jodi A.. Transit of Empire : Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2011. Accessed September 1, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Created from yale-ebooks on 2017-09-01 08:11:53.
xxxiv INTRODUCTION
If anything, bringing indigenous and tribal voices to the fore within post-
colonial theory may help us elucidate how liberal colonialist discourses
depend upon sublimating indigenous cultures and histories into fictive hy-
bridities and social constructions as they simultaneously trap indigenous
peoples within the dialectics of genocide, where the only conditions of
Copyright 2011. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved.
possibility imagined are either that indigenous peoples will die through
genocidal policies of colonial settler states (thus making room for more
open and liberatory societies) or that they will commit heinous genocides
in defense of lands and nations.
Methodologically, an indigenous-centric approach to critical theory
helps to identify the processes that have kept indigenous peoples as a
necessary pre-conditional presence within theories of colonialism and its
post. To engage this point, I read moments of cacophony in political,
literary, and cultural productions. Identifying the competing interpreta-
tions of geographical spatialities and historicities that inform racial and
decolonial identities depends upon an act of interpretation that decenters
the vertical interactions of colonizer and colonized and recenters the hori-
zontal struggles among peoples with competing claims to historical op-
pressions. Those vertical interactions continually foreground the arrival of
Europeans as the defining event within settler societies, consistently place
horizontal histories of oppressions into zero-sum struggles for hegemony,
Byrd, Jodi A.. Transit of Empire : Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2011. Accessed September 1, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Created from yale-ebooks on 2017-09-01 08:11:53.
INTRODUCTION xxxv
and distract from the complicities of colonialism and the possibilities for
anticolonial action that emerge outside and beyond the Manichean allego-
ries that define oppression. Of particular interest to this book, then, is the
development of a more detailed analysis of how cultural, literary, and po-
litical assemblages in the United States depend upon a desire to reconcile
through deferment the colonization of indigenous peoples within the hor-
izontal scope of settler/arrivant colonialism, racism, homophobia, and sex-
ism, a desire that implicates all those who reside on colonized indigenous
lands. The significance, I hope, for both postcolonial studies and American
Indian studies as disciplines, and for the nascent indigenous critical theory
arising from the work of native scholars grounded in the knowledges of
their communities, is to take seriously the lessons of the past and other
struggles for decolonization and to then transform how we approach these
issues through academic engagement so that our work and research ques-
tions reflect the best of our governance and diplomatic traditions.
To that end, the first chapter interrogates the Indian errant at the heart
of poststructuralism and considers how that errant has rendered Indian-
ness as the field through which empire transits itself within political, liter-
ary, juridical, and cultural productions. Gerald Vizenor writes, The Indian
with an initial capital is a commemoration of an absenceevermore that
double absence of simulations by name and stories. But within post-
structuralist theories, I argue, the Indian functions as a dense presence that
Copyright 2011. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved.
Byrd, Jodi A.. Transit of Empire : Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2011. Accessed September 1, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Created from yale-ebooks on 2017-09-01 08:11:53.
xxxvi INTRODUCTION
The second chapter, This Islands Mine: The Parallax Logics of Cali-
bans Cacophony, discusses the historical factors that complicated Coco
Fusco and Guillermo Gmez-Peas performance art piece, Two Undis-
covered Amerindians Visit . . . and contributed finally to its failed engage-
ment with the colonialist discourses that they sought to resist during the
quincentennial celebrations of Columbuss discovery. Shakespeares
The Tempest and the character of Caliban have long served as touchstones
within the development of postcolonial theory. And yet, despite the new
world context of the play and Calibans claim that this islands mine, most
postcolonial engagements with this text have rendered the impact of the
indigenous Americas on Shakespeares colonial imagination as an archaic
artifact. By positioning Caliban as one of the first textual examples of what
I term colonial cacophony, I take up Gayatri Spivaks claim that Caliban
functions as a textual blankness that precludes subaltern representation
and argue instead that he is overfilled with consolidated and compet-
ing discourses. Reading this character, then, as simultaneously African,
Irish, Carib, Arawak, Jewish, and Other, I suggest that Caliban serves as
a cacophonous textualization that does not trac in absence but rather
oversignifies presence in informative ways that unravel colonial logics that
are dependent on binary constructions of settler/native, black/white, and
master/slave. Through this simultaneity, I suggest, we can see the complex
dynamics of colonial discourses that exist horizontally among histories
Copyright 2011. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved.
Byrd, Jodi A.. Transit of Empire : Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2011. Accessed September 1, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Created from yale-ebooks on 2017-09-01 08:11:53.
INTRODUCTION xxxvii
Byrd, Jodi A.. Transit of Empire : Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2011. Accessed September 1, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Created from yale-ebooks on 2017-09-01 08:11:53.
xxxviii INTRODUCTION
Indian Reorganization Act of , and this chapter examines how the con-
tinual transformation and revision of federal Indian policy becomes, when
viewed from over , miles away in the Pacific, a coherent and inevitable
expansionist discourse orchestrated by a seemingly static United States. In
the face of these colonial processes that seek to mask the fractures within
U.S. boundaries among American Indian nations, it seems important to
examine how discourses of Indianness are used both by the imperial U.S.
government, which occupies Hawaii, and by those Native Hawaiian activ-
ists who frame Indianness as an infection threatening their rights and
status as an internationally recognized sovereign state.
The final chapter, Killing States: Removals, Other Americans, and the
Pale Promise of Democracy, considers Karen Tei Yamashitas Tropic of
Orange and discussions of multiculturalism in Los Angeles at the end of
the twentieth century to understand how narratives of race and indigeneity
within the United States have been recycled to provide a justifying logic for
the transit of empire mapped onto Asian American bodies. In this chapter,
I examine the ways indigenous peoples are discursively transformed into
immigrants, while Asian Americans simultaneously become both cowboys
and Indians as a means to police dierence within liberal multicultural
settler colonialism. To demonstrate how these histories collide, I examine
John Colliers speech at Poston Relocation Center on the Colorado River
Indian Reservation. In the decade after the Indian Reorganization Act of
Copyright 2011. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved.
Byrd, Jodi A.. Transit of Empire : Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2011. Accessed September 1, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Created from yale-ebooks on 2017-09-01 08:11:53.
INTRODUCTION xxxix
sporic migrants, queers, and people of color for participating in and ben-
efiting from indigenous loss of lands, cultures, and lives and subsequently
to position indigenous otherness as abject and all other Others as part of
the problem, as if they could always consent to or refuse such positions or
consequences of history. And though I do critique the elisions and logics
that have continued to inform settler colonial politics that have remained
deeply rooted within liberal humanisms investments in the individual, in
the singular, and in the racializations of white possession, I also want to
imagine cacophonously, to understand that the historical processes that
have created our contemporary moment have aected everyone at vari-
ous points along their transits with and against empire. If colonialism has
forced the native to cathect the space of the Other on his home ground as
Spivak tells us, then imperialism has forced settlers and arrivants to cathect
the space of the native as their home. In drawing this distinction, my goal
is to first activate indigeneity as a condition of possibility within cultural
studies and critical theory and then deploy it to avoid the syllogistic traps
of equivalencies on the one hand and the economies of racism, homopho-
bia, sexism, and classism that continue to order the place of peoples on
indigenous home grounds on the other. Such an approach, I hope, may
provide possible entry points into critical theories that do not sacrifice in-
digenous worlds and futures in the pursuit of the now of the everyday.
The pole is still leaning, and there is still further to go. How we get there
Copyright 2011. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved.
Byrd, Jodi A.. Transit of Empire : Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2011. Accessed September 1, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Created from yale-ebooks on 2017-09-01 08:11:53.
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Copyright 2011. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved.
Byrd, Jodi A.. Transit of Empire : Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2011. Accessed September 1, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Created from yale-ebooks on 2017-09-01 08:11:53.