The Transit of Empire

quotes from Jodi Byrd's book:

theory of place and narrative and the place of IPs within postcolonial theories, queer, race theories

syllogistic tropes of participatory democracyborn out of violent occupatio of lands

how Indianness functions as a transit within empire

to read mnemonically is to connect the violence and genocides of colonization to cultural production and cultural movements

multicultural liberal democracy rationalize historical traumas thru inclusion

IPs must be central to any theorizations of the condition of postcoloniality, empire, and regimes that arise out of indigenous lands

transit - fluidity, noise, instability; to exist relationally, multiply

liberal multiculturalism invested in acknowledgements, recognition, equality, equivalences

US colonialism and imperialism coerces struggles for social justice for queers, racial minorities, immigrants into complicity with settler colonialism

"derealization of the other"

metropolitcan multiculturalism and dominant postcolonialism prose the US as a postracial asylum for the world, the diminishing return of that asylum meets at the point where diasporas collides with settler colonialism

US cultural and political preoccupations with indigeneity and reproduction of Indianness serve to facilitate, justify and maintain Anglo-Amerian hegemonic mastery over signifcation of justice, democracy, law and terror

how would debate change if the responsiblities of the real lived condition of colonialism were prioritized as a condition of possibility

sovereignty without rights to self government, territorial integrity, cultural autonomy

Indian as the ghost in the machine of empire

erasure of the sovereign - racialization of the Indian

colonization = racialization; where Indians become ethnic minorities

loss of intimacies on four continents - genocide, slavery, indenture, liberalism (lisa lowe)

"cathect" "parallax"

conflation of territoriality with conquest by assigning colonization to the racialized body

multicultural liberalism aligns itself with settler colonialism

Haksuba/chaos

postcolonial studies have ignored indigenous struggles in the US

indigeneity can be too dangerous and xenophobic when combined with  nationalism or anticolonial struggles in a world shaped by forced diaspora, migration, hybridity and movement

cultural studies...towards a joyous cacophony of multiplicities and away from the lived colonial conditions of indigeneity within postcolonial-settler society

how did the impulse to constellate the America into European colonial alignment come to depend upon the lamentable but ungrievable Indian? how do arrivals and other peoples forced to move thru empire use indigeneity as a transit to redress, grieve, and fill the fractures and ruptures created thru diaspora and exclusion?

what happens to indigenous peoples and the stakes of sovereignty, land, decolonization when conquest is reframed thru the global historicities of race?

how to discern how the noise of competing claims, recognitions, remediations function to naturalize possession at the site of postracial inclusion, transformative multiculturalism, and cruel optimism.