Native American Structures of Feeling: Affect, Subjectivity, and Indigeneity in America

Catalog description

This graduate seminar stages a meeting between the field of Native American and Indigenous Studies and the capacious network of affect theory to attend to the experiences of Native Americans living amidst ongoing U.S. occupation of their lives and lands. Taking our cue from Driftpile Cree poet Billy-Ray Belcourt, we will question the ways in which the “grammar of Indigenous Studies misapprehends the tumult of everyday life” through the field’s emphasis on sovereignty and political recognition. We will trace a colonial history that has made categories such as “the human” and “the subject” unavailable to Native people, and consider the affective conditions created for individuals living within a state made possible only through their elimination. What lives do Native people forge despite the confines that settler colonialism carves for them? How might we better understand these lives through Native literature?