Sovereignty's Glitch: Structures of Feeling in Native American Literature

Abstract

Sovereignty’s Glitch: Structures of Feeling in Native American Literature reads contemporary Native American cultural production as aesthetic works that contest the logics of solution and integration, remedy and repair, which necessarily accompany the paradigm of sovereignty as it has been taken up in the field of Native American and Indigenous Studies. This project takes into consideration the fundamental aporia that is tribal sovereignty in that it is a political quality that arrives at the same time as it is denied. For tribes and Native people in America alike, this denial signals the inherent contradiction of Native life in the contemporary: that paradox of being both material presence and figural absence, being subjects of a state that eschews their subjectivity, being racial objects rather than political peers. Rather than rooting my analysis of these literatures in the paradigms of presence and survivance which have now become dominant frameworks in the field of Native American Studies for analyzing Native American life, I take up an alternative analytical framework by attending to the coercive positions of absence and social death. I argue that the field’s emphasis on sovereignty has subordinated the wound of Native life and the experience of social death in favor of a progressive discourse of solution, integration, and possibility under neoliberal multiculturalism. While such discourses name modes of continuing to live in an unethical world, the authors I read in this project all stage scenes wherein Native people are made to leave or reject the world. Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas (2017), Tommy Pico’s Nature Poem (2017), Tommy Orange’s There There (2018), and Linda Hogan’s Mean Spirit (1990) are all literatures which detail unique circumstances through which the integrity of the tribal nation as a form, the protections that sovereignty might offer, and corresponding Native life and subjectivity have been made precarious, and even untenable, by the American state. Through readings of these texts, I dilate moments of interpersonal settler-Native encounters to magnify the affective residue engendered by the personal, social, and material violences provoked by the ongoing structure of settler colonialism (I refer to the phenomenon of these affective residues as “sovereignty’s glitch”). These literatures, I argue, avoid offering recuperative possibility—they refute logics of remedy, repair, and inclusion. In so doing, they refuse continued practices of making coherent the unethical settler colonial project of America.