Over the past forty years, recognition has become the dominant mode of negotiation and decolonization between the nation-state and Indigenous nations in North America. The term?recognition? shapes debates over Indigenous cultural distinctiveness, Indigenous rights to land and self-government, and Indigenous peoples' right to benefit from the development of their lands and resources. In a work of critically engaged political theory, Glen Sean Coulthard challenges recognition as a method of organizing difference and identity in liberal politics, questioning the assumption that contemporary difference and past histories of destructive colonialism between the state and Indigenous peoples can be reconciled through a process of acknowledgment. Beyond this, Coulthard examines an alternative politics--one that seeks to revalue, reconstruct, and redeploy Indigenous cultural practices based on self-recognition rather than on seeking appreciation from the very agents of colonialism. Coulthard demonstrates how a?place-based? modification of Karl Marx's theory of?primitive accumulation? throws light on Indigenous-state relations in settler-colonial contexts and how Frantz Fanon's critique of colonial recognition shows that this relationship reproduces itself over time. This framework strengthens his exploration of the ways that the politics of recognition has come to serve the interests of settler-colonial power. In addressing the core tenets of Indigenous resistance movements, like Red Power and Idle No More, Coulthard offers fresh insights into the politics of active decolonization. --Provided by publisher.
Setting / LocationGlobal
Story EraModern Era
Protagonist / CoreRed Skin, White Masks Lead Character
"Across North America, Indigenous acts of resistance have in recent years opposed the removal of federal protections for forests and waterways in Indigenous lands, halted the expansion of tar sands extraction and the pipeline construction at Standing Rock, and demanded justice for murdered and missing Indigenous women. In As We Have Always Done, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson locates Indigenous political resurgence as a practice rooted in uniquely Indigenous theorizing, writing, organizing, and thinking. Indigenous resistance is a radical rejection of contemporary colonialism focused around refusing the dispossession of Indigenous bodies and land. Simpson makes clear that the resistance's goal can no longer be cultural resurgence as a mechanism for inclusion in a multicultural mosaic. Instead, she calls for unapologetic, place-based Indigenous alternatives to the destructive logics of the settler colonial state, including heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalist exploitation."--Dust jacket.
The Narrative Secret of Flannery O'Connor provides new insights into the full corpus of O'Connors fiction by exploring the intersection of O'Connor's artistic intentions and her religions preoccupations. Johansen looks first at how the stories create meaning in order to explain what they mean. Drawing on a variety of critical methods from narratology, anthropology, mythology, and reader response criticism, this study invites us to reconsider O'Connor's complex and enigmatic texts through their structures and actions. By focusing on the interplay of O'Connor's narrative structures, the human psyche, and the institutions and traditions of our collective history - particularly ancient myths and legends - Johansen illuminates the relation between narration, the self, and spiritual transformation. . O'Connor's narratives employ figures, gestures, and actions that work to deceive or disorient the reader. These havoc-wreaking forces in and among the stories most resemble the archetypal trickster. Johansen demonstrates that, through such tricksteresque activity, O'Connor's narratives push the reader to acknowledge the perverse, violent, and often disorderly aspects of human and divine behavior. The religious secret of O'Connor narratives - revealed in shimmering environments where narration and incarnation meet - is that both evil and good, the grotesque and the ideal, violence and peace, Satan and God, the human and the divine exist together in sacred unity. O'Connor's literary secret, through which she discloses the religious one, is to tell stories that return human beings to original mythic events. By recasting these events in contemporary fiction, with the assistance of the trickster, she performs a ritual function that is as necessary in an individualistic, technological age as it is in a communitarian, primitive one. With its emphasis on narrative structures, this investigation of O'Connor's writing holds significance for other literature studies because it enables readers to see what results from the common failure to understand the interdependence of narration and incarnation: a reduction of both literature and religion to barren systems insulating people from mythic truths rather than pulling them toward freedom. This book discloses the double function of language through which spiritual, intellectual, and even social transformations become possible. On the one hand, language erects a cultural canon to secure people against fear of freedom and the threat of chaos. On the other hand, when language playfully subverts the canon by returning it to its wild, forgotten origins for renewal, it challenges human beings to free themselves from dying religious metaphors and decaying social institutions.
Explains how and why different religions came about and what they provided their followers. Also discusses certain elements such as holy objects, religious laws, and the priesthood common to all faiths.
Red Skin, White Masks by Glen Sean Coulthard | Literally Just Books
