What does it mean to say that Native peoples exist in the present? In Beyond Settler Time Mark Rifkin investigates the dangers of seeking to include Indigenous peoples within settler temporal frameworks. Claims that Native peoples should be recognized as coeval with Euro-Americans, Rifkin argues, implicitly treat dominant non-native ideologies and institutions as the basis for defining time itself. How, though, can Native peoples be understood as dynamic and changing while also not assuming that they belong to a present inherently shared with non-natives? Drawing on physics, phenomenology, queer studies, and postcolonial theory, Rifkin develops the concept of "settler time" to address how Native peoples are both consigned to the past and inserted into the present in ways that normalize non-native histories, geographies, and expectations. Through analysis of various kinds of texts, including government documents, film, fiction, and autobiography, he explores how Native experiences of time exceed and defy such settler impositions. In underscoring the existence of multiple temporalities, Rifkin illustrates how time plays a crucial role in Indigenous peoples' expressions of sovereignty and struggles for self-determination.
ISBN-13: 9780822362975
Media Type: Paperback
Publisher: Duke University Press
Publication Date: 02-24-2017
Pages: 296
Product Dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.62(d)
Mark Rifkin is Director of the Women's and Gender Studies Program and Professor of English at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro and the author of several books, including Settler Common Sense: Queerness and Everyday Colonialism in the American Renaissance.
What People are Saying About This
Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations - Mishuana Goeman
"Mark Rifkin's compelling book breaks new grounds and new temporalities, serving to further illuminate the ways that settler colonialism structures the political and everyday life of Indigenous peoples in the United States. As with Rifkin's previous work, Beyond Settler Time is a must-read for those in Indigenous studies, settler colonial studies, and queer studies."
Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories - Elizabeth Freeman
"Beyond Settler Time is a magnificent book. Already at the very top of his field, Mark Rifkin clarifies with depth and lucidity how Native American genocide was achieved through the violent imposition of settler time, while showing us how to conceptualize temporalities based in the Native American experience without resorting to models of tradition or modernity. His phenomenological approach, combined with historical rigor, careful readings of aesthetic and documentary texts, and astute political analysis, makes for a very illuminating read."
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Table of Contents
Preface vii
Acknowledgments xv
1. Indigenous Orientations 1
2. The Silence of Ely S. Parker 49
3. The Duration of the Land 95
4. Ghost Dancing at Century's End 129
Coda. Deferring Juridical Time 179
Notes 193
Bibliography 241
Index 269
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