The Discourse of Sovereignty in American Indian Print Culture

FAIN: HB-50200-12

David Carlson
California State University, San Bernardino (San Bernardino, CA 92407-2318)

With the support of an NEH Fellowship, I propose to complete a book manuscript (provisionally titled The Discourse of Sovereignty in American Indian Print Culture) that examines the relationship between various models of sovereignty and contemporary American Indian literature, a relationship mediated through a broader Indian print culture.

Associated Products

Imagining Sovereignty: Self-Determination in American Indian Law and Literature (Book)
Title: Imagining Sovereignty: Self-Determination in American Indian Law and Literature
Author: David J. Carlson
Abstract: “Sovereignty” is perhaps the most ubiquitous term in American Indian writing today—but its meaning and function are anything but universally understood. This is as it should be, David J. Carlson suggests, for a concept frequently at the center of various—and often competing—claims to authority. In Imagining Sovereignty, Carlson explores sovereignty as a discursive middle ground between tribal communities and the United States as a settler-colonial power. His work reveals the complementary ways in which legal and literary texts have generated politically significant representations of the world, which in turn have produced particular effects on readers and advanced the cause of tribal self-determination. Drawing on western legal historical sources and American Indian texts, Carlson traces a dual genealogy of sovereignty. Imagining Sovereignty identifies the concept as a marker, one that allows both the colonizing power of the United States and the resisting powers of various American Indian nations to organize themselves and their various claims to authority. In the process, sovereignty also functions as a point of exchange where these claims compete with and complicate one another. To this end, Carlson analyzes how several contemporary American Indian writers and critics have sought to fuse literary practices and legal structures into fully formed discourses of self-determination. After charting the development of the concept of sovereignty in natural law and its permutations in federal Indian policy, Carlson maps out the nature and function of sovereignty discourses in the work of contemporary Native scholars. Often read in opposition, the writings of these indigenous authors emerge in Imagining Sovereignty as a coherent literary and political tradition—one whose varied discourse of sovereignty aptly reflects American Indian people’s diverse political contexts.
Year: 2016
Publisher: Norman: University of Oklahoma Press
Type: Single author monograph
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

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