Description
Book SynopsisThroughout the history of colonialism competing representations of the indigenous have been deployed by colonial powers to their own advantages and ends. Historically the indigenous have been represented as belonging to a past temporality in ways that legitimized colonial rule in the present and future. This book provides a cutting-edge, theoretically innovative, and analytically detailed response to significant developments occurring in the fields of indigenous governance. This book will explore the interfaces between power and indigenous critique by discussing widely articulated attributes of indigenous subjectivity. The book raises questions about the surfaces of contact between neoliberalism and indigeneity today. We know much by now about the long history of colonial violence that arose from the western desire to transform indigenous peoples on account of their perceived inferiority. We recognize and understand much less of the violence which arises from the purported desire to protect indigenous peoples and ‘the ontological alterity they are said to embody. Yet that is the form, this book asserts, which neoliberal violence towards indigenous peoples now takes.
Trade ReviewWritten by two of the most important political theorists writing on the Anthropocene, Becoming Indigenous is an agenda-setting critique. It deftly indicts and exposes the shocking ways in which indigenous peoples are being framed and saturated with meaning by others; reduced to tropes of mere adaptation and resilience or to sites of speculation: reducing meaningful resistance and politics. -- Jonathan Pugh, Senior Academic Fellow in Territorial Governance, University of Newcastle
Faced with the end times of climate catastrophe, we are all compelled to ‘become indigenous’. Chandler and Reid track the adoption of indigenous knowledge across Western scholarship, government policy and activism—not to address historic dispossession and exclusion, but as resources for newly imagined Western futures. This important and provocative book exposes fault lines in the most influential critical theory of our times. Tracking relationships between the colonization of indigenous imagination and the policing of indigenous imaginaries, Becoming Indigenous clears new ground for differently figured politics of coexistence. -- Melinda Hinkson, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Deakin University, Australia
Table of ContentsIntroduction / 1. Dispossession / 2. From Culture to Knowledge / 3. Perseverance / 4. Pluriversal Politics / 5. Resilience / 6. Imagination / 7. Conclusion
