Reading Territory

“An important addition to a growing body of scholarship on Indigenous and Black histories of relationality, placemaking, and state-formation. . . . Reading Territory offers a provocative and important literary and historical analysis of Indigenous and Black world-building beyond the US state that is certain to become required reading for undergraduates and scholars across many academic fields.”—American Periodicals

“Walkiewicz’s book will interest historians primarily for its inventive readings of a wide array of sources, which she assembles in striking juxtapositions. . . . [H]er methods are justified by her aim to provide a usable past, and she is admirably forthright about the present-day concerns that inform her writing”–Journal of American History

“Walkiewicz’s territorial hermeneutics wield close reading and visual analysis like scalpels. . . . [Her] depiction of speculative and actual Black and Native alliances in Reading Territory reminds us of and points us toward the ways that the antistatist imagination (theory) and praxis are animating land-back experiments enacted by Sogorea Te Land Trust, the Weelaunee Forest, and its Defenders that stand in the way of Cop City’s construction, and liberated zones on college campuses calling for an end to Palestinian (Indigenous) genocide. As Walkiewicz makes clear, studying Indigenous and Black nineteenth-century print culture is essential to imagining and enacting futures beyond the settler colonial state.”—Early American Literature

“Innovative. . . . This book should attract a wider readership among scholars working on U.S. and colonial histories and cultures. It exposes the complex and messy battles for identities, space, and place in the context of a settler colonial empire in the making [and] exposes the grim soul of U.S. empire where print cultures served as complicated machinations for asserting colonial rule and for disputing it.”—Journal of the Civil War Era

“Reading Territory is a groundbreaking book that reads Indigenous presence into the narrative and onto the land.”—Kansas History

“Walkiewicz draws on an impressive range of sources and scholarship to consider Indigenous and Black agency, conflict, alliance, and contestation against white supremacist ideologies behind state formation. This work is an intellectually and ethically compelling contribution to vital conversations in and between Indigenous studies, African American studies, and settler-colonial studies.”—Daniel Heath Justice (Cherokee Nation), University of British Columbia

“Reading Territory is a rigorous examination of how Black and Native dispossession were carried out not simply at the level of nation but rather at more granular scales of state formation, law, and policy. Presenting the state as an essential site of white supremacist and colonialist violence, Walkiewicz reads a diverse assembly of periodicals, government and legal documents, literary texts, personal accounts, images, and more to reveal the local and regional scales at which Native and Black people contested settler colonialism and racism.”—Brigitte Fielder, University of Wisconsin–Madison