Settler Common Sense: Queerness and Everyday Colonialism in the American Renaissance
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.62 (728 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 081669060X |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 320 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2014-02-20 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
Gentle Reader said Smart and essential book.. This is a smart book, aimed at an academic audience but useful for a general reader who is interested in 19th century American culture and politics. If you are a non-academic reader, you may want to start with Rifkin's *How Did Indians Become Straight* before moving on to this one, but Settler Common Sense is full of intelligent insights about how white settlers felt and continue to feel entitled to space. It turns out that "everyday experience" for white. Kenneth Goodall said Academic Yawn. Rifkin appears to have good things to say about 19th century American literature and settlers' affairs with Native Americans but he wraps it in so much tongue-twisting yawn-inducing academese that I can't for the life of me figure out what he's saying. He seems to implicate Henry David Thoreau (yes, Henry David Thoreau!) in some kind of masturbatory machinations but I can't quite fathom their nature (or unnature, as the case may be).
"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
Although the books he focuses on are not about Indians, they serve as examples of what Rifkin calls “settler common sense,” taking for granted the legal and political structure through which Native peoples continue to be dispossessed.In analyzing Nathaniel Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables, Rifkin shows how the novel draws on Lockean theory in support of small-scale landholding and alternative practices of homemaking. As against the turn to “nature,” Herman Melville’s Pierre presents the city as a perversely pleasurable place to escape from inequities of land ownership in the country. The book invokes white settlers in southern Maine as the basis for its ethics of improvement, eliding the persistent presence of Wabanaki peoples in their homela