U.S. Settler Colonial Biopolitics and Indigenous Life Writing
Final Report Abstract
Placed at the intersection of biopolitics, Indigenous studies, settler colonial studies, and life writing studies, the project has explored how acts of life writing by Indigenous authors in the U.S. bring to the fore and work to disrupt the biopolitical logics of race and seemingly universal norms integral to settler colonialism and constitutive to the U.S. as a settler nation-state from its foundation to the present. The project has asked how such a logic is based on and helps to reinforce positing the U.S. nation-state as the norm of political formation, and Euro-American life as the norm of the human. In contrast to these constructions, Indigenous peoples are declassified and Indigenous life is made disposable as well as exposed to forms of settler colonial violence. Not accounted for as violations of Indigenous people’s rights to (political) existence, these mutually reinforcing logics become means of making the settler state and its subjects live in the seemingly self-evident terms of civilization, modernity, or multicultural liberalism. While such formulated ideals of U.S. society are historically variable, they indicate simultaneously a biopolitical norm to be upheld for the constant purpose of securing settler state sovereignty. Furthermore, the project has investigated the thesis that acts of Native life writing function as a powerful instrument of disrupting these logics by showing how Native bodies, lives, and lands can represent forms and formulations of Indigenous politics. Read as interventions into settler colonial biopolitical logics and sites of political knowledge production by Indigenous intellectuals, the project has shown how the authors of these texts seek to expose the foundational aspects of settler colonial biopolitics. As they refuse to be contained within the apolitical category of Indianness, they attain a position of agency from which they offer a severe critique of the politics of the settler state, which challenges its seemingly universal norms. Furthermore, in drawing on and dramatizing Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies of life, their narratives indicate dimension of political life that cannot be reduced to a biopolitics of race, and instead point to Indigenous formations of peoplehood, sovereignty and selfdetermination. Their writing amounts to an assertion of a lived sovereignty that defies the limitations of the settler state, its biopolitical order, and lived colonial logics. As one of its central results, the project has thus probed how North American Indigenous life writing contains a crucial activist impulse in the movement toward a politics of decolonizing life and life writing. Understood as a social and political practice, Indigenous life writing offers ways to think and imagine Indigenous futurity and decolonization as a transformative possibility beyond U.S. settler colonial biopolitical rule. The most unexpected development came through the high degree of international collaboration that was initially unanticipated and led to two further publication projects in addition to the monograph, an edited collection and a special issue. The strong interaction with the international academic community in Indigenous and settler colonial studies led to a theoretical redirection of the project as well as a refocusing of the analytical approach. Theoretically, the project shifted from the investigation of particular biopolitical mechanisms to the analysis of the logics of settler colonial biopolitics through which certain political systems and particularly racialized forms of the human are constructed as the norm at the expense of other forms of political and human life. Analytically, the focus shifted from reading Indigenous life writing texts from how they represented and critiqued biopolitical techniques to understanding Indigenous life writing as a social and political practice with a decolonial potential that could work toward disrupting the biopolitical logics of U.S. settler colonialism and thereby projecting new possibilities for Indigenous political life. Finally, the detail necessary to develop in-depth readings of the texts that could draw out their decolonial potential and their relevance for debates today led to a concentration of the corpus of texts for closer consideration from eight to four. Instead of the originally planned four chapters with paired readings of two texts each, the monograph is comprised of the introduction and four chapters with an in-depth analysis of one text or author each, which in each chapter serves as a spotlight that has the ability to illuminate different texts and wider contexts of its respective period.
Publications
- “Biopolitics and Indigenous Literary Studies: Settler Colonial Hierarchies, Relational Lives, and the Political Potential of Native Writing in N. Scott Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain.” Comparative Indigenous Studies, ed. Mita Banerjee. Heidelberg: Winter Verlag, 2016. 57-82
René Dietrich
- “Embodied Memories: Settler Colonial Biopolitics and Multiple Genealogies in Deborah Miranda’s Bad Indians. A Tribal Memoir.” Biopolitics and Memory in Postcolonial Literature and Culture, ed. Michael R. Griffiths. Farnham: Ashgate, 2016. 137-52
René Dietrich
(See online at https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315563060-7) - “Made to Move, Made of this Place: Into America, Mobility, and the Eco-Logics of Settler Colonialism.” Amerikastudien/American Studies 61.4 (2016): 507-26. Special issue on “Environmental Imagination on the Move: Nature and Mobility in American Literature and Culture”
René Dietrich
- “The Biopolitical Logics of Settler Colonialism and Disruptive Relationality.” Cultural Studies - Critical Methodologies 17.1 (2017), 67-77. Special issue on “Settler Colonialism and Cultural Studies”
René Dietrich
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1177/1532708616638696) - Settler Colonial Biopolitics and Indigenous Lifeways. American Indian Culture and Research Journal special issue. 42.2 (2018)
René Dietrich
(See online at https://doi.org/10.17953/aicrj.42.2.dietrich-a)
