Reading Territory
Indigenous and Black Freedom, Removal, and the Nineteenth-Century State
By Kathryn Walkiewicz
314 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 25 halftones, notes, bibl., index
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Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4696-7295-3
Published: April 2023 -
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4696-7294-6
Published: April 2023 -
eBook ISBN: 978-1-4696-7296-0
Published: March 2023
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Walkiewicz centers her analysis on statehood movements to create the places now called Georgia, Florida, Kansas, Cuba, and Oklahoma. In each case she shows that Indigenous dispossession and anti-Blackness scaffolded the settler-colonial project of establishing states' rights. But dissent and contestation by Indigenous and Black people imagined alternative paths, even as their exclusion and removal reshaped and renamed territory. By recovering this tension, Walkiewicz argues we more fully understand the role of state-centered discourse as an expression of settler colonialism. We also come to see the possibilities for a territorial ethic that insists on thinking beyond the boundaries of the state.
About the Author
Kathryn Walkiewicz is assistant professor in the Department of Literature at the University of California, San Diego.
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Reviews
"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