Sovereign Acts: Contesting Colonialism Across Indigenous Nations and Latinx America

While the sovereign nation-state is considered the world’s political norm, millions of colonial subjects, immigrants, refugees, and native peoples appear to be without sovereignty. What claims have they to sovereignty? If they cannot ever constitute themselves into sovereign nation-states, are they out of the political game? Can a framework like sovereignty—used historically to exploit, dispossess, and even exterminate people—be a part of a struggle for political freedom?

Editor Frances Negrón-Muntaner and the contributors to Sovereign Acts engage in a debate around these questions with surprising results. Moving the idea of sovereignty beyond the narrow confines of the nation-state, beyond the concept of a power that one either has or lacks, this paradigm-­shifting work examines the multiple ways that Indigenous nations and U.S. territorial peoples act as sovereign and the possible limits of such sovereign acts within the current globalized context. A valuable contribution to the debate around indigenous and other conceptions of sovereignty, Sovereign Acts goes further than legal frameworks to investigate the relationships among sovereignty, gender, sexuality, representation, and the body.

From activist style and choreography to the politics of recognition, the scholars and artists featured in this unique volume map out how people disrupt modern notions of sovereignty, attempt to redefine what being sovereign means, or seek alternative political vocabularies. Sovereignty is not only, after all, a kingdom and a crown.

CONTRIBUTORS

Michael Lujan Bevacqua
Glen Coulthard
Jennifer Nez Denetdale
Adriana María Garriga-López
Jessica A. F. Harkins
Brian Klopotek
Davianna Pomaika‘i McGregor
Frances Negrón-Muntaner
Yasmin Ramírez
Mark Rifkin
Madeline Román
Stephanie Nohelani Teves
Fa‘anofo Lisaclaire Uperesa
 

Frances Negrón-Muntaner is an award-winning filmmaker, writer, curator, scholar, and professor at Columbia University, where she is founding director of the Media and Idea Lab. Among her books and publications are Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Latinization of American Culture and “The Latino Media Gap.” Negrón-Muntaner is also founding curator of the Latino Arts and Activism Archive at Columbia’s Rare Books and Manuscripts Library.