Bøger af Kathryn Walkiewicz

The formation of new states was an essential feature of US expansion throughout the long nineteenth century, and debates over statehood and states' rights were waged not only in legislative assemblies but also in newspapers, maps, land surveys, and other forms of print and visual culture. Assessing these texts and archives, Kathryn Walkiewicz theorizes the logics of federalism and states' rights in the production of US empire, revealing how they were used to imagine states into existence while clashing with relational forms of territoriality asserted by Indigenous and Black people. Walkiewicz centers her analysis on statehood movements to create the places now called Georgia, Florida, Kansas, Cuba, and Oklahoma. In each case she shows that Indigenous dispossession and anti-Blackness scaffolded the settler-colonial project of establishing states' rights. But dissent and contestation by Indigenous and Black people imagined alternative paths, even as their exclusion and removal reshaped and renamed territory. By recovering this tension, Walkiewicz argues we more fully understand the role of state-centered discourse as an expression of settler colonialism. We also come to see the possibilities for a territorial ethic that insists on thinking beyond the boundaries of the state.

"In her newest book Reading Territory, Kathryn Walkiewicz uses literary and historical methods to investigate how the borders of the US settler nation-state shifted throughout the long nineteenth century. She theorizes the roles of federalism and statehood in the production of US empire, particularly during nineteenth-century statehood movements. In the course of following these movements over time, from Georgia (1788) to Florida (1845), Kansas (1861), and Oklahoma (1907), Walkiewicz places Indigeneity and Blackness into a conversation with the rhetorics of states' rights in America. Throughout, she offers careful and nuanced readings of Indigenous and Black agency, conflict, alliance, and contestation as they relate to, and against, statist ideologies of white supremacy. Walkiewicz offers a nuanced, well-researched, and compellingly argued analysis of the ways that Indigenous and Black subjectivities have grappled with these complex relations between statehood and personhood as they sit within the context of an expanding American empire across the nineteenth century"--