Coordinated by Chris Finley
RESEARCH OBJECTIVE:
This cluster aims to document the experiences of militarization, forced removal, genocide, and the mass migration of indigenous people, creating new academic and community-based research while also making important comparative linkages to other Ethnic Studies sub-fields. Our objective is to think about native studies in relation to knowledge systems, settler logics and policies, and social contestations. Through book groups, meetings, presentations, graduate seminars, and dialogues between faculty and graduate students we develop a conceptual approach to legal recognition, racial violence, biopolitics and the way that colonialism casts its long shadow in modernity. Studying the dialectic between indigeneity and settler societies through grounded research and epistemological ruptures, we make links to the historical and contemporary oppressions of other communities of color.
We methodologically use knowledge formations that begin to trace out the subjectivities, memories, and complexity of state sanctioned violence in the intimacies of the every day, especially in relation to indigenous bodies. We note and analyze how the assault on native bodies, particularly native women, has been integral to US Empire. We analyze and pursue the theories and practices of decolonization. We complicate tradition, representation, property, genealogy and blood ties. Finally, we think through how settler and gender normativities produce complex social and cultural dynamics in the US, in the Western Hemisphere, and beyond.
Faculty:
John Carlos Rowe
David Treuer
Neetu Khanna
Graduate Students:
Cecilia Caballero
Sarah Fong
Rebekah Garrison
Sam Ikehara
Michelle Vasquez Ruiz
Schedule of Events
JANUARY 24 2013, KAP 445
Speaker: Emma Perez, University of Colorado, Boulder
“Decolonizing Queer Racialized Sexualities”
THURSDAY NOV. 7 2013, 2-3pm, KAP 445
Speaker: Luis E. Cárcamo-Huechante, University of Texas, Austin
“Indigenous Grassroots Radio in the Bío-Bío”
THURSDAY, NOV. 7 2013, 4-5:30pm, SOS 250
Speaker: Florencia Mallon, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Narratives of Memory in Chile: Forty Years Later”
Co-sponsored by History Department
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 29, 2014, KAP 445, 3-5pm.
Speaker: Mishuana Goeman, UCLA, “Native Women Mapping: A Graduate Seminar,” co-sponsored by ASE Indigeneity and Decolonization Research Cluster.
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 13, 2014, KAP 460, 2-4pm
Speaker: Nancy Postero, UC San Diego, “Wedding the Nation: Spectacles of Indigeneity in Plurinational Bolivia.”
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 27, 2014, KAP 460, 2-4:30pm
Speaker: Joanne Barker, University of San Francisco
“In Debt: A Reconsideration of ‘Race, Empire, and the Crisis of the Subprime’ from Manna-Hata,”
TUESDAY, MARCH 11, 2014 KAP 445, 3-4:30pm,
Speaker: Neetu Khanna, USC Comparative Literature, “Progressive Feeling: Visceral Realisms and Marxist Aesthetics in the Literature of Decolonizing India.”
TUESDAY, JANUARY 23, 2018
Reading group meeting on Leanne Simpson’s Islands of Decolonial Love.
TUESDAY, MARCH 20, 2018
Reading group meeting to discuss John Carlos Rowe’s book chapter about Sarah Winnemucca.
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 21, 2018
Dr. Keith Camacho (UCLA Asian American Studies) “On Native Testimony: Military Tribunals, War Crimes, and Imperial Judgement in Guam.”
TUESDAY, APRIL 10, 2018
Writing workshop with Sarah Fong, dissertation chapter
Contact Us
Department of American Studies & Ethnicity
Located in Kaprielian Hall on the University Park campus, ASE faculty, graduate students, and staff are available to assist you with information and resources about our academic programs and research specialties.
Address
University of Southern California
3620 South Vermont Avenue
Kaprielian Hall 462
Los Angeles, California 90089-2534