Indigenomicon: American Indians, Video Games, and the Structures of Dispossession

Jodi A. Byrd

ISBN 10: 1478032642 / ISBN 13: 9781478032649

Published by Duke University Press, 2025

About this Item

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Seller Inventory # B9781478032649

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Indigenomicon: American Indians, Video Games, and the Structures of Dispossession
• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Publication Date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1478032642
• ISBN 13: 9781478032649
• Binding: Paperback / softback
• Condition: New
• Weight: 622 grams

About this title

Synopsis

Settler colonial studies and Indigenous studies are often assumed to be the same intellectual project. In Indigenomicon, Jodi A. Byrd examines the differences between the two fields by bringing video game studies and Indigenous studies into conversation with Black studies, queer studies, and Indigenous feminist critique. Byrd theorizes “the image of the law of the Indigenous” as structuring dispossession in games including Assassin’s Creed, Animal Crossing, BioShock Infinite, and Demon Souls. They demonstrate how games and play might reveal histories of slavery, genocide, and theft of Indigenous lands even as their structures obscure Indigenous spatial and embodied practices that prioritize relationships with land, water, plants, and spirits. With ground and relationality defined as key concepts, Byrd centers Indigenous visions of dystopias to reveal how game spaces encode settler structures of governance even as the design of games might yet provide vital modes of resistance to Indigenous erasure.

About the Author

Jodi A. Byrd is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma and Professor of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago, coeditor of Colonial Racial Capitalism, also published by Duke University Press, and author of The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism.