U.S. Settler Colonial Biopolitics and Indigenous Life Writing

• Applicant: Dr. René Dietrich
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
• Term: from 2013 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 239118768

Placed at the intersection of biopolitics, Indigenous studies, settler colonial studies, and life writing studies, the project explores how acts of life writing by Indigenous authors in the U.S. bring to the fore and work to disrupt the biopolitical logics of racialization, regularization, and naturalization integral to settler colonialism and constitutive to the U.S. as a settler nation-state from its foundation to the present. The project asks how such a logic is based on and helps to reinforce positing the U.S. nation-state as the norm of political formation, and Euro-American life as the norm of the human, in contrast to which Indigenous peoples are declassified and Indigenous life is made disposable and exposed to overt and covert forms of settler colonial violence. Not accounted for as violations of Indigenous people's rights to (political) existence, these mutually reinforcing logics become means of making the settler state and its subjects live in the seemingly self-evident terms of civilization, modernity, or multicultural liberalism. While such formulated ideals of U.S. society are historically variable, they indicate simultaneously a biopolitical norm to be upheld for the constant purpose of securing settler state sovereignty.Furthermore, the project investigates the thesis that acts of Native life writing function as a powerful instrument of disrupting these logics by signifying Native bodies, lives, and lands as indexing forms and formulations of Indigenous politics. Read as interventions into settler colonial biopolitical logics and sites of political knowledge production by Indigenous intellectuals, the project shows how the authors of these texts seek to expose the foundational aspects of settler colonial biopolitics, refuse to be contained within the depoliticized category of Indianness, and attain a position of agency from which to not only offer a severe critique of the politics of the settler state, but also to denaturalize settler colonial rule. Furthermore, in drawing on and dramatizing Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies of life, their narratives indicate dimension of political lives, as well as of a politics of life, that cannot be reduced to biopolitical modes of racialization, and instead point to Indigenous formulations and formations of peoplehood, sovereignty and self-determination. Their writing amounts to an assertion of a lived sovereignty that defies the limitations of the settler state, its biopolitical order, and lived colonial logics. The project thus wants to probe how North American Indigenous life writing contains a crucial activist impulse in the movement toward a politics of decolonizing life and life writing, as well as offering ways to think and imagine Indigenous futurity and decolonization as a transformative possibility beyond U.S. settler colonial biopolitical rule.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants