This chapter reads María Cristina Mena’s “The Birth of the God of War” (1914) alongside Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of the Coyolxauhqui imperative in Light in the Dark/Luz in lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality (2015) to theorize brown modernism. Building on the work of José Esteban Muñoz, who theorizes a “sense of brown” that emerges from a felt community based on brownness,” I contend that Mena’s and Anzaldúa’s engagement with Aztec myths allows them to theorize brownness by centering indigeneity through a feminist lens. In this way, both authors illuminate the divergent modernities that attend their depictions and engagement with indigeneity. Focusing on brown modernism over white modernism illuminates how different modernisms have their own temporalities as brown modernism drags modernist aesthetics deeper into the twentieth century. Moreover, this chapter shows how, in taking up an explicit engagement with indigeneity, brown modernism stresses the importance of having such conversations, particularly when such engagements are uncomfortable and problematic. Doing so allows for a deeper accounting of the kinship between Chicanxs – and Latinxs more broadly – and indigeneity.

This chapter attends to the formal and cultural function of Latinx racial passing in Who Would Have Thought It? (1872) by María Amparo Ruiz de Burton. Critical conversations about the orphan protagonist of the novel, Lola Medina, interrogate her rescue from Indian captivity and the gradual “whitening” of her dyed skin as a form of aspirational assimilation into Anglo-American society. Scholars have also studied the ways in which Lola’s captivity story is informed by the historical precedent and publications surrounding the repatriation of Olive Oatman to white American society after her five-year captivity among the Mohave in the 1850s. This contribution reads Lola’s performance of Latinx racial passing alongside the captivity narrative, newspaper articles, and visual culture from the Oatman case to argue how the idea of “passing” operates in the novel as a form of political critique and a catalyst for modernist, formal innovation. Lola’s narrative of Latinx racial passing not only illuminates an early discourse of Latinx racialization, but also catalyzes a modernist satire of Anglo-American imperialism.

This chapter explores how country and city stand in as proxies for political, racial, and cultural positions. The country operates as the custodian of the “real America,” which becomes imagined as white, masculine, traditionalist, and working class. The city, meanwhile, teems with the elite and the cosmopolitan. Such gestures conjure away any trace of Indigenous peoples, migrant farmers and ranchers, urban–rural labor alliances, black agrarian Populists, and the city’s intersectional working class. Even as we must acknowledge the generative role country-and-city scholarship has played in US literary criticism, this chapter ultimately calls for rethinking this binary by turning to texts that provide a different account of the rural – a narrative that the country as a concept so effectively obfuscates. Writing by authors such as Hamlin Garland and Zitkála-Šá, conventionally categorized as local-color or regionalist, demonstrates that scarcity and survivance rather than city and country shaped the cultural politics of rural spaces in the nineteenth century. They both challenged the bureaucratic state, as an entity that protected the interests of finance capital by subjecting settlers to constant precarity and violently seeking to dispossess Indigenous peoples of their own land, liberty, and literature.

This chapter lingers on the very notion of territory itself as a spatial imaginary, a literary trope, and a political crucible for competing ideas of sovereignty. In particular, it examines how territory, or perhaps more precisely, territoriality, did not simply work at the behest of US empire but also served as an essential spatial register for working alongside and even against US territorial annexation, occupation, and colonization. Throughout the nineteenth century, the United States asserted an understanding of sovereignty that foregrounded dominance over a territory and its inhabitants. At the broadest scale, territory denoted the sovereign’s property (the United States), and sovereignty denoted control over territory. Settler-colonial notions of sovereignty and territory conflicted with Indigenous understandings of sovereignty that often foreground responsibility to human and other-than-human relatives within a shared space or territory rather than possession of property. This chapter’s three sections, “Terra Nullius,” “Indian Territory,” and “Black Territories,” each take up a concept of territoriality that profoundly influenced US colonial expansion at the expense of other narratives of placemaking. Each section details how narratives of territoriality forcefully shaped US politics and culture while also describing competing notions of placemaking that disrupt these dominant narratives.

This chapter argues that what Gerard Manley Hopkins termed the “rural scene” provided a focal point in the 1870s for profound changes in the Victorian understanding, valuation, and transformation of the natural world. British writing at this time demonstrates a shift from viewing the rural scene as picturesque landscape, as evidenced in provincial novels such as George Eliot’s Middlemarch, to conceiving of it as an environment encompassing human and nonhuman nature, notably in Richard Jefferies’ nature writings and Thomas Hardy’s first Wessex novels. Grasping the full scope of Victorian responses to the rural scene in the 1870s also requires looking to the expanding pastoral industries of the settler empire. Writing in and about the settler colonies of Australia and New Zealand, by Lady Barker, Rolf Boldrewood, and Anthony Trollope, highlights how a perceived absence of rural aesthetic values helped render colonial nature available for transformation and subsequent economic exploitation.

This essay traces the study of the vexed topic of sentimentalism in long nineteenth-century American critical discourse. Over the past decades, scholars have drawn upon different disciplines and critical theories to reframe the expansive and subtle complexities of sentimentalism’s influence as mode and ideology; these investigations, under the capacious term “feeling,” sometimes dovetail with, and other times are disaggregated from, inquiries into sympathy, affect studies, the sensorium, and the history of emotions. Although the turn to affect has been seen as a way out of political overdetermination, concerns about liberatory potential and structural collusions were prefigured and informed by debates about sentimentality’s ethical bind. This essay turns to negative terms, glossing the use of “unfeeling” in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and then appearances of “unfeeling” and “unsympathetic” in illustrative scholarship over the last three decades for their operations and implications. The chapter then teases out the cultural politics of unfeeling from a queer, feminist of color perspective: What if one reconsiders unfeeling from the vantage point of those marginalized and not simply as hegemonic imposition? The discussion closes with Yankton Dakota writer Zitkala-Ša, reassessing the Indigenous activist’s wish, in her own words, to become “unfeeling stone.”

In the twentieth century, settler states have operated through science. At the same time, the field of American bioethics has safeguarded the moral authority of science. It has done so by upholding the settler logics of the sciences that it claimed to hold to account. This chapter explores how the imperial logic of American bioethics works – through its concepts, practices, and imperceptions. To do so, the chapter follows Carolyn Matthews, an everyday American with a rich “vernacular archive” and apt work experiences, across three medical sites and over three postwar decades. It tells Carolyn’s story in two registers – setting Carolyn’s work experience prior to 1974, when the US Congress passed laws for the treatment of human subjects, alongside Carolyn’s moral recounting of those work experiences in the late 1970s. Carolyn’s case offers insight into how the vocabulary and framework of modern American bioethics embeds a moral ontology organized around civic individualism and its safeguarding, as opposed to anticolonialism and its dismantling. The aim of this critique of bioethics through the Americas is to strengthen existing alliances for justice-based science and to inform anticolonial practices – in science, history, and transformative bioethics.

The Preface outlines the origins, motivations, history, and stakes of the project that led to the publication of this book, and it discusses the project’s relationship to scholarship in Indigenous Studies and engagement of key works in that field. It explores what an approach informed by Indigenous Studies can bring to the history of the human sciences, and how it might build upon existing scholarship on this topic.

This chapter seeks to trouble the understanding of how the category of the “human” is articulated in the theory and literature concerning race. It asks how one might view the category of the “human” differently when the focus is shifted from Blackness to Indigeneity. Departing from the premise that Black studies recurringly examines the question of which bodies are assigned a fully human status in a white-dominated society, the chapter posits that Indigenous studies and literatures interrogating the category of the “human” oftentimes ask a question that moves beyond dehumanization: namely, how the human is constructed or constituted in relation to other forms of life, other-than-human or more-than-human, including the land itself. Beyond literary articulation and theoretical interest, this question also has political import as it works to shift the parameters of what is thinkable as politics under the auspices of settler colonialism, as this chapter shows through the analysis of present-day Indigenous poetry by Deborah Miranda (Esselen/Chumash) and Natalie Diaz (Mojave).

The chronology in which a narrative concludes is itself an argument. Therefore, ending States-in-Waiting in 1966 – with the demise of the Nagaland Peace Mission, the dissolution of the World Peace Brigade, and the International Court of Justice’s refusal to make a judgment on the legitimacy of South African rule of South West Africa/Namibia – spells out a narrative of disillusionment: of disenchantment with the inability of the liberal internationalism of both the United Nations system of international order and of transnational civil society organizations to find peaceful solutions to decolonization that could effectively support national self-determination as a universal right.

The meteoric growth of the platform economy, its economic underpinnings as well as the accompanying human practices, have provoked academic debates as well as shone a light on its praxis. In this gig economy, the conditions of work have significantly changed from what used to be relatively stable markets, moored self- and work identities, with predictable technological cycles, established jobs in which individuals were ‘tied’ into roles and their organisations-of-employ, sufficient income during work and non-work periods, and with substantive protections through employment rights and social protection – also known as the standard employment relationship (SER). The gig economy has introduced efficiencies in engaging customer segments and supply chains, however its non-standard forms of employment (NSFE) which includes part-time, temporary, and zero-hour contracts and dependent self-employment, has brought with it: low pay, insufficient and variable hours, short-term contracts, and limited social protection rights (Rubery, Grimshaw, Keizer & Johnson, ). The majority of employees, migrants and foreigners, remain dependent on in-country structures to grant them SER rights – in many countries, though, they do not have the power to engage with those structures and no way to build on and improve their rights. The emerging story of the gig economy divides scholars, particularly in relation to the distribution of the economic and social benefits of this ‘new economy’, as well as international relations (IR) scholars in that race and indigeneity, and its intersections, have been missing in many of the debates. The challenge remains to upend the coloniality and neoliberal nature of work, and create a more democratic and inclusive labour market, in which more of the economic benefits are fairly distributed among those who participate in the gig economy and not just for indigenous citizens exclusively.

This chapter provides a critical review of the latest debates within Indigenous gender studies that aim to advance understanding and awareness of gender relations and gender-based ideologies shaped in response to socioeconomic upheavals associated with patriarchal colonialism. Drawing from a spate of recent publications of gender-focused Indigenous studies, the discussion examines what theoretical and onto-epistemological insights are offered by Indigenous scholars involved in attempts to trace gender conflicts and tensions while identifying their implications for the contemporary constructions of gender, sex, indigeneity, and decolonization. Focusing on the studies of Indigenous gender formations with their nonbinary, ungendered, or genderless foundations in the circumpolar North and beyond, the author looks at how Indigenous gender studies continue questioning and challenging the deep-seated heteropatriarchal divisions, colonial heteronormativity, biological determinism, and neocolonial discourses on indigeneity.

Inspired by recent work on global decadence as well as Susan Sontag’s classic formulation of dandyism, this chapter focuses on the figure of the dandy as he appears in fiction and nonfiction writing from and about the Hawaiian islands. In the hands of Anglo-American travel writers such as Charles Warren Stoddard and Robert Louis Stevenson, the island dandy often embodies an alluring but dangerous decadence associated in particular with late nineteenth-century Polynesia; for Indigenous writers and practitioners, by contrast, the dandy’s subversive, nonnormative masculinity becomes a way of leveraging European style against encroaching colonial power. This chapter argues that the island dandy thus emblematizes the manifold anxieties surrounding cultural and political modernity that would emerge in the 1890s and give the decade its characteristic sense of jubilant expectation and pessimistic dread. Within the broader context of the volume, the chapter also considers what approaches and methods might better serve the field of Victorian studies as it reorients itself along increasingly global lines.

This chapter traces the turn in diasporic thought, particularly in the settler nations of Australia, Canada, Aotearoa New Zealand, and the United States, toward engagement with the settler colonial histories of dispossession that were a condition of possibility for our arrivals here. It develops brief close readings of literary texts by Black, Asian diasporic, and Indigenous writers as a way to show how the entanglement of Indigenous and diasporic struggles for justice and transformation might be inhabited and mobilized. At stake, this chapter argues, is the possibility of imagining other worlds than the modernities that were born in the conjunction of Indigenous dispossession and racial slavery, worlds shaped by better, more sustaining (and sustainable) practices for relating with human and nonhuman others, including the land itself.