Speaking for the People: Native Writing and the Question of Political Form

In Speaking for the People Mark Rifkin examines nineteenth-century Native writings to reframe contemporary debates around Indigenous recognition, refusal, and resurgence. Rifkin shows how works by Native authors (William Apess, Elias Boudinot, Sarah Winnemucca, and Zitkala-Sa) illustrate the intellectual labor involved in representing modes of Indigenous political identity and placemaking. These writers highlight the complex processes involved in negotiating the character, contours, and scope of Indigenous sovereignties under ongoing colonial occupation. Rifkin argues that attending to these writers' engagements with non-native publics helps provide further analytical tools for addressing the complexities of Indigenous governance on the ground--both then and now. Thinking about Native peoplehood and politics as a matter of form opens possibilities for addressing the difficult work involved in navigating among varied possibilities for conceptualizing and enacting peoplehood in the context of continuing settler intervention. As Rifkin demonstrates, attending to writings by these Indigenous intellectuals provides ways of understanding Native governance as a matter of deliberation, discussion, and debate, emphasizing the open-ended unfinishedness of self-determination.

Author: Mark Rifkin
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 09/03/2021
Pages: 320
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.95lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.67d
ISBN13: 9781478014331
ISBN10: 1478014334
BISAC Categories:
- Social Science | Ethnic Studies | American | Native American Studies
- Literary Criticism | Indigenous Peoples in the Americas
- Literary Criticism | American | General

About the Author
Mark Rifkin is Professor of English and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. He is the author of several books, including Fictions of Land and Flesh: Blackness, Indigeneity, Speculation and Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination, both also published by Duke University Press.