The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism

Front Cover
U of Minnesota Press, Sep 6, 2011 - Political Science - 294 pages

In 1761 and again in 1768, European scientists raced around the world to observe the transit of Venus, a rare astronomical event in which the planet Venus passes in front of the sun. In The Transit of Empire, Jodi A. Byrd explores how indigeneity functions as transit, a trajectory of movement that serves as precedent within U.S. imperial history. Byrd argues that contemporary U.S. empire expands itself through a transferable “Indianness” that facilitates acquisitions of lands, territories, and resources.

Examining an array of literary texts, historical moments, and pending legislations—from the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma’s vote in 2007 to expel Cherokee Freedmen to the Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization bill—Byrd demonstrates that inclusion into the multicultural cosmopole does not end colonialism as it is purported to do. Rather, that inclusion is the very site of the colonization that feeds U.S. empire.

Byrd contends that the colonization of American Indian and indigenous nations is the necessary ground from which to reimagine a future where the losses of indigenous peoples are not only visible and, in turn, grieveable, but where indigenous peoples have agency to transform life on their own lands and on their own terms.

 

Contents

Poststructural Indians without Ancestry
1
The Parallax Logics of Calibans Cacophony
39
Wilson Harriss Jonestown and the Thresholds of Grievability
77
Cherokee Freedmen Internal Colonialism and the Racialization of Citizenship
117
Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization and the Discourses of Resistance
147
Removals Other Americans and the Pale Promise of Democracy
185
Zombie Imperialism
221
Acknowledgments
231
Notes
235
Index
271
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (2011)

Jodi A. Byrd is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma and assistant professor of American Indian studies and English at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.

Bibliographic information