Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"A sophisticated and rigorous interdisciplinary work,
Settler Common Sense is a wonderful, unsettling contribution to American literary studies, native studies, and queer studies." —Beth Piatote, University of California, Berkeley
"Mark Rifkin adds to his brilliant collection of work on settler colonialism by challenging the scholarly tendency to frame settler colonialism as a consistent, already made structure or set of logics that people today simply inhabit."—Andrea Smith
"A useful starting point for further analysis, laying the groundwork for future scholars to explore how a variety of cultural products—if subtly—encouraged the dispossession of Native Americans during one of the US’s most important periods of physical growth and ideological development."—CHOICE
"Rifkin presents clear, fascinating, and focused readings of texts that offer new questions for how queer studies tools can be used in connection with ethics (queer and Indigenous) to read foundational literary texts."—American Literature
"Rifkin has opened a necessary dialogue."—The Year’s Work in English Studies
"Offers an important reminder of the expropriation and erasure on which nineteenth-century American culture was built, even after 'Indians' have ostensibly vanished from areas like New England and New York."—Modern Philology
Table of ContentsContents
Acknowledgments
Introduction1. Ordinary Life and the Ethics of Occupation2. Romancing the State of Nature: Speculation, Regeneration, and the Maine Frontier in House of the Seven Gables3. Loving Oneself Like a Nation: Sovereign Selfhood and the Autoerotics of Wilderness in Walden4. Dreaming of Urban Dispersion: Aristocratic Genealogy and Indian Rurality in PierreNotesBibliographyIndex
