SPAN 737: Indigenous and Black Decolonial Thinking
The Erotics of Indigenous Sovereignty
By Mark Rifkin
Mark Rifkin is a Professor of English at UNC Greensboro. His research primarily focuses on Native American writing and politics from the eighteenth century onward, exploring the ways that Indigenous peoples have negotiated U.S. racial and imperial formations. In particular, he is interested in how U.S. law shapes the possibilities for representing Native political identity and the ways that Native writers have worked to inhabit, refunction, refuse, and displace dominant administrative formulations in order to open room for envisioning and enacting self-determination. More recently, he has been drawing on queer theory to rethink the role kinship systems have played in Native governance and internationalism and to address the ways U.S. imperialism can be thought of as a system of compulsory heterosexuality. He is the author of numerous articles and four books: Settler Common Sense: Queerness and Everyday Colonialism in the American Renaissance (University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming 2014), The Erotics of Sovereignty: Queer Native Writing in the Era of Self-Determination (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), When Did Indians Become Straight? Kinship, The History of Sexuality, and Native Sovereignty (Oxford University Press, 2011), and Manifesting America: The Imperial Construction of U.S. National Space (Oxford University Press, 2009).