Reading Territory: Indigenous and Black Freedom, Removal, and the Nineteenth-Century State - Softcover

Walkiewicz, Kathryn

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1469672952 ISBN 13: 9781469672953

Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press, 2023

Synopsis

The formation of new states was an essential feature of US expansion throughout the long nineteenth century, and debates over statehood and states' rights were waged not only in legislative assemblies but also in newspapers, maps, land surveys, and other forms of print and visual culture. Assessing these texts and archives, Kathryn Walkiewicz theorizes the logics of federalism and states' rights in the production of US empire, revealing how they were used to imagine states into existence while clashing with relational forms of territoriality asserted by Indigenous and Black people.

Walkiewicz centers her analysis on statehood movements to create the places now called Georgia, Florida, Kansas, Cuba, and Oklahoma. In each case she shows that Indigenous dispossession and anti-Blackness scaffolded the settler-colonial project of establishing states' rights. But dissent and contestation by Indigenous and Black people imagined alternative paths, even as their exclusion and removal reshaped and renamed territory. By recovering this tension, Walkiewicz argues we more fully understand the role of state-centered discourse as an expression of settler colonialism. We also come to see the possibilities for a territorial ethic that insists on thinking beyond the boundaries of the state.

About this title

About the Author

Kathryn Walkiewicz is assistant professor in the Department of Literature at the University of California, San Diego.

Edition details

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Publication date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1469672952
• ISBN 13: 9781469672953
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 314