A Race of Devils: Race-Making, Frankenstein, and The Modern Prometheus

2021 ◽  
pp. 009059172098868
Author(s):  
P. J. Brendese
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Religious Conversion ◽  
Raw Material ◽  
Subject Formation ◽  
Native Peoples ◽  
Cultural Genocide ◽  
Liberal Humanism

This essay engages Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus as a salient intervention into modern political theory. I analyze the work as a cipher for the tensions inhabiting Euro-modernity’s stitched together fictions of racial determinism and racial dynamism legible in slavery, assimilationist projects and White fears reverberating throughout. Adapting the mythical ancient Prometheus as one who steals fire from the gods to create humans and civilization, Frankenstein dramatizes the risks and monstrous results of White imperial masculinity as a Euro-colonial Promethean project of subject formation and race-making. Viewed through the prism of the Modern Prometheus, modernity in general and liberal humanism in particular are recast as monster-making projects. The European “discovery” of Indigenous peoples amplified Promethean aspirations to create subjects through civilizational processes of religious conversion, the infusion of Enlightenment rationality, and assimilation into whiteness. Politically, the Promethean capacity to engineer humans and proto-humans using Native peoples as raw material allowed progressives to argue against outright extermination in favor of cultural genocide. Seeking to create a subserviant species, Victor Frankenstein confronts a revolting insurrection of his own making—a Creature who refuses slavery, claims mastery over his creator and demands a female companion. Yet Frankenstein’s fear of creating “a race of devils” betrays a terror of what Whites know, but refuse to acknowledge, about themselves and racial others.

Native Approaches to Decolonising Education in Institutions of Higher Learning

2000 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 28-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Polly Walke
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Higher Learning ◽  
Native Peoples ◽  
Institutions Of Higher Learning ◽  
The World

A growing number of Native scholars are involved in decolonising higher education through a range of processes designed to create space for Indigenous realities and Indigenous ways of managing knowledge. Basing their educational approaches on Indigenous ontologies and epistemologies, they are developing Indigenist approaches within higher education. Ward Churchill (1996:509), Cherokee scholar, explains that an Indigenist scholar is one who:Takes the rights of indigenous peoples as the highest priority …who draws on the traditions – the bodies of knowledge and corresponding codes of value – evolved over many thousands of years by native peoples the world over.

Severed Connections

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel K. Richter ◽  
Troy L. Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Capitalist System ◽  
Native Peoples ◽  
Indigenous Autonomy ◽  
Indian Politics ◽  
Native Communities ◽  
European Expansion ◽  
North And South ◽  
Independence Movements

Scholars often portray indigenous peoples' interactions with the Atlantic world in linear terms: European expansion engulfed native communities and enslaves them to a global capitalist system. The mid-eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries, however, tells a more complicated tale. By the 1750s, many native peoples had learnt from decades of experience how to engage the Atlantic world on their own varied terms, often to their own advantage. Those engagements were disrupted by the British, French, and Spanish imperial crises spawned by the Seven Years War and especially by the creole independence movements born during those crises. The process worked out differently north and south of the Rio Grande, but, throughout the Americas, the collapse of European empires severed connections that had once guaranteed indigenous autonomy. If balance was the principle of ‘modern Indian politics’, trade was its glue. Throughout the Americas, creoles who proclaimed themselves civilised arrogated to themselves the terms on which native peoples could, or could not, engage with the Atlantic world.

Minority Rights

2018 ◽  
pp. 165-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Will Kymlicka
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Minority Rights ◽  
International Order ◽  
The Political ◽  
International Level ◽  
International Political Theory ◽  
Rights Issues

It has often been noted that the political claims of minorities and indigenous peoples are marginalized within traditional state-centric international political theory; but perhaps more surprisingly, they are also marginalized within much contemporary cosmopolitan political theory. In this chapter, I will argue that neither cosmopolitanism nor statism as currently theorized is well equipped to evaluate the normative claims at stake in many minority rights issues. I begin by discussing how the “minority question” arose as an issue within international relations—that is, why minorities have been seen as a problem and a threat to international order—and how international actors have historically attempted to contain the problem, often in ways that were deeply unjust to minorities. I will then consider recent efforts to advance a pro-minority agenda at the international level, and how this agenda helps reveal some of the limits of both cosmopolitan and statist approaches to IPT.

Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 163-174
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Alan Erbig
Keyword(s):  
South America ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Southern Brazil ◽  
Native Peoples ◽  
Northeastern Argentina

Following the formation of independent republics in southeastern South America, travellers, politicians and academics alike used the territorial imaginaries of the Madrid and San Ildefonso boundary commissions to envision national communities devoid of Native peoples. Whether narrating patriotic histories of territorial conquest or using colonial borders to catalogue Indigenous peoples who had routinely traversed them, postcolonial authors simultaneously appropriated Native pasts while denying the existence of their Indigenous contemporaries. Contradictory claims of Indigenous emigration emerged in Uruguay, northeastern Argentina, and southern Brazil, and Charrúas and Minuanes were reduced to bit players in or antecedents to the formation of national or subnational communities. By considering the interplay between territorial imaginaries and identity formation, the conclusion demonstrates how the re-emergence of Charrúas on a regional political scale since the late 1980s not only disrupts national mythmaking but fits within deeper historical patterns.

Land of Opportunity: Anti-Black and Settler Logics in the Gentrification of Detroit

2019 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-133
Author(s):  
Jessi Quizar
Keyword(s):  
Native Americans ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Predominantly Black ◽  
Native Peoples ◽  
Black Neighborhoods ◽  
Land Grabs ◽  
The City ◽  
Black Land

It is an increasingly common trope in anti-gentrification activism to claim that gentrification of Black neighborhoods is a form of settler colonialism. Although Native critics have pushed back against these metaphors as abstractions of, and false equivalencies to, the concrete conditions of settler colonialism, gentrifying discourse frequently draws on the language and logic of settler colonialism in narratives about the city of Detroit. In this article, I ask what it means that terms and logic that are being applied to a predominantly Black city were, and are, also used to rationalize and structure theft of land from Native Americans. Proposing that shifting white interests in Black land have led to “borrowing” of longstanding logics used to dispossess Native peoples, I argue that the reiteration of settler-colonial logics in Detroit to explain and justify gentrification manifestly both validates land grabs in the city and further erases the claims of both Black and Indigenous peoples to Detroit.

Indigenous stewardship as a lifeway1

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 133-138 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalie Avalos
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Environmental Justice ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
The United States ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Native Peoples ◽  
The World

As the decade closes, Indigenous peoples have re-emerged as a critical voice advocating not just for environmental justice but for an entirely different way of living and being with the world. As the descendants of the original inhabitants of lands now dominated by others, they are often entangled in ongoing struggles to protect their lands and sovereignty. Settler colonialism is now famously understood as a structure, not an event, meaning that colonial projects must be continually re-inscribed through discursive and juridical means in order to naturalize Indigenous dispossession. As a religious studies scholar, I am interested in the ways Native peoples in the United States operationalize religious action as an expression of refusal ‐ a refusal to acquiesce their religious lifeways and rights to their lands.

The Merger of Federal Subjects of the Russian Federation During Putin's Presidency and After

2009 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-135 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans Oversloot
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Russian Federation ◽  
Final Part ◽  
Institutional Changes ◽  
Dominant Position ◽  
Native Peoples ◽  
Unitary State ◽  
The Russian Federation ◽  
Self Rule

AbstractAmong the institutional changes brought about or instigated during Vladimir Putin's two terms in office as President of the Russian Federation (RF), the reduction of the number of federal subjects of the RF—i.e., the number of territorial–administrative 'entities' that together constitute the Russian Federation—has perhaps attracted the least attention. However, this policy of reducing the number of subjects by bringing about what is effectively a merger of two or three subjects, thereby creating new federal subjects, is worthy of attention for a number of reasons. This policy is one of the ways in which the Federation's center (re)asserts its dominant position vis-à-vis the 'constitutive parts' of the Federation, which are, indeed, treated as 'subjects' within a more unitary state format. This policy runs counter to what appears to be a trend in many other countries where 'native peoples' (or 'indigenous peoples') are accorded various forms of self rule, often within their 'home territories' ('self-government rights').This article will address the procedures being followed to bring about the reduction of the number of subjects, as well as the reasons for merging smaller subjects, in terms of the number of inhabitants, with larger ones. The possible future of the policy of subject merger will be discussed in the final part of the article. It will be argued that the reduction of the number of subjects of the Russian Federation to merely a few dozen will entail the end of Russia as a federation; by doing so, Russia will reconstitute itself as a unitary state.

Cannibal Theologies in Colonial Portuguese America (1549-1759)

2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 64-90 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Kittiya Lee
Keyword(s):  
Religious Conversion ◽  
Lingua Franca ◽  
Native Peoples ◽  
Translation Strategies ◽  
Thick Layers

This article examines Jesuit-signed texts written in the Brasílica lingua franca and used in the religious conversion of native peoples in colonial Portuguese America (1549-1759). I study translation strategies for conveying the sacrament of Communion, arguing that doctrinal explanations and word choices recorded in catechisms and dictionaries reflect Tupi-Guarani beliefs that shaped Christianity. These translations merged the theophagous doctrine of the Eucharist with Tupinambá vengeance and exocannibalism, which were central to rituals enacted to bring about that earthly utopia that the Indians called the Land Without Evil. Thus did a distinct eschatology form, compressed with thick layers of Tupi-Guarani and Iberian Catholicism in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In late colony, these became reinterpreted by non-Tupi-Guarani Indians who renamed the Eucharist. But in every telling, the promise of the Eucharist remained the same: that the eating of an other gave access to salvation and eternal bliss.

Political Theory and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

2004 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 150
Author(s):  
Michael Asch ◽  
Duncan Iveson ◽  
Paul Patton ◽  
Will Sanders
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Indigenous Peoples
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