rdf-syntax-grammar
mods:
  schema location: http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3 http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/v3/mods-3-2.xsd
  title info:
    title: Settler Common Sense
    sub title: Queerness and Everyday Colonialism in the American Renaissance
  name:
    name part: Rifkin, Mark
    name part: 1974-
    role:
      role term: creator
    role:
      role term: author.
  type of resource: text
  genre: bibliography
  origin info:
    place:
      place term: mnu
    date issued: 2014
    copyright date: 2014
    issuance: monographic
  language:
    language term: eng
  physical description:
    form: print
    extent: xxii, 293 pages ; 23 cm.
  abstract: In Settler Common Sense, Mark Rifkin explores how canonical American writers take part in the legacy of displacing Native Americans. 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. 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 homeland. Rifkin suggests that Henry David Thoreau's Walden critiques property ownership as a form of perpetual debt. Thoreau's vision of autoerotic withdrawal into the wilderness, though, depends on recasting spaces from which Native peoples have been dispossessed as places of non-Native regeneration. 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. Rifkin demonstrates how this account of urban possibility overlooks the fact that the explosive growth of Manhattan in the nineteenth century was possible only because of the extensive and progressive displacement of Iroquois peoples upstate. Rifkin reveals how these texts' queer imaginings rely on treating settler notions of place and personhood as self-evident, erasing the advancing expropriation and occupation of Native lands. Further, he investigates the ways that contemporary queer ethics and politics take such ongoing colonial dynamics as an unexamined framework in developing ideas of freedom and justice.
  table of contents: Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1. Ordinary Life and the Ethics of Occupation -- 2. Romancing the State of Nature: Speculation, Regeneration, and the Maine Frontier in House of the Seven Gables -- 3. Loving Oneself Like a Nation: Sovereign Selfhood and the Autoerotics of Wilderness in Walden -- 4. Dreaming of Urban Dispersion: Aristocratic Genealogy and Indian Rurality in Pierre -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.
  note: Mark Rifkin.
  note: Includes bibliographical references and index.
  subject:
    topic: Indians in literature
  subject:
    topic: Queer theory
  subject:
    topic: Homosexuality in literature
  subject:
    topic: SOCIAL SCIENCE / Ethnic Studies / Native American Studies
  subject:
    topic: SOCIAL SCIENCE / Gay Studies
  subject:
    topic: LITERARY CRITICISM / Native American
  classification: PN56.3.I6 R54 2014
  classification: 809/.933520397
  identifier: 9780816690572 (hardback : acid-free paper)
  identifier: 081669057X (hardback : acid-free paper)
  identifier: 9780816690602 (pbk : acid-free paper)
  identifier: 081669060X (pbk : acid-free paper)
  identifier: 2013038694
  record info:
    record content source: DLC
    record creation date: 131125
    record change date: 20151206101947.0
    record identifier: in00003459431