Alternative Relationships in the Wake(s): Intersections in Indigenous and Black Theory and Praxis Público
Norman, Cierra (Spring 2023)
Published
Abstract
This thesis observes the unfolding legacy of settler-carceral colonialism that is co-created by the wakes of anti-Black slavery and anti-Indigenous settlement. Contemporary sociopolitical and economic infrastructures are sustained on colonial conditions of Indigenous and Black social death. Within the settler-carceral wake(s), Indigenous and Black communities reject colonial aesthetics of fatalism, victimry, and historic amnesia through wake work that is interrelated and often in dialogue. Indigenous and Black annotation are multimodal forms of wake work that are tools of resistance and counter-abandonment. Annotations interrogate and reject settler-carceral archives to “see more” and prioritize other knowledges of/and histories. Black and Native annotative supplementation (re)claims ancestral knowledge and ways of being that have been violently dislocated and erased through imagining. This imagining functions to fill-in the archive with narratives that are intentionally left out of hegemonic knowledges because they disrupt and threaten to destroy the foundations of contemporary settler-carceral logics and structures of racial capitalism. The first chapter analyzes Deborah Miranda’s (2013) tribal memoir, Bad Indians, as a useful site to observe the ways Black and Indigenous modes of knowledge production and resistance to the (anti-Black and anti-Indigenous) wake(s) are always already interrelated. The first chapter focuses on wake work that is oriented towards the past; that (re)claims ancestral knowledges and relationships, and resists historic archives of erasure and misrepresentation. The second chapter is concerned with imagining the future, the construction of alternative worlds, and how we might get there. Modes of Indigenous and Black wake work challenge and expand ways of imagining and creating futures in which the world works differently through creative production at the intersections of science, technology, and the future. The final chapter observes embodiments of Black and Indigenous wake work in the present at Standing Rock and in Detroit and Flint (MI). Environmental Justice in the wake(s) re-imagines ontologic relationships between people and land through divestment from the settler-carceral imperial state. Such wake work fosters and prioritizes alternative modes of relationality that condition and imagine alternative relationshps and futures in the wake(s).
Table of Contents
Introduction………………………………………………………………..1
Chapter 1: Debora Miranda’s Bad Indians as an Example of Native Wake work and Ancestral Reclaiming In/Against Settler Archives of History……………………………………………..18
Chapter 2: Indigenous Futurisms and Afrofuturism: Interrogating and Imagining Futures In and Beyond the Wake(s)………………………………………………………………….35
Chapter 3: Enacting Decolonization and Abolition in the Present through Embodied Praxes of Indigenous and Black Environmental Wake Work……………………………………………..60
Conclusion: Unknowing the Future…………………………………………………………..72
Notes………………………………………………………………..74
Bibliography………………………………………………………………..82
About this Honors Thesis
| School | |
|---|---|
| Department | |
| Degree | |
| Submission | |
| Language |
|
| Research Field | |
| Palavra-chave | |
| Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor | |
| Committee Members |
Primary PDF
| Thumbnail | Title | Date Uploaded | Actions |
|---|---|---|---|
|
|
Alternative Relationships in the Wake(s): Intersections in Indigenous and Black Theory and Praxis () | 2023-04-11 12:46:03 -0400 |
|
Supplemental Files
| Thumbnail | Title | Date Uploaded | Actions |
|---|