The contributors to Biopolitics, Geopolitics, Life investigate biopolitics and geopolitics as two distinct yet entangled techniques of settler-colonial states across the globe, from the Americas and Hawai‘i to Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand. Drawing on literary and cultural studies, social sciences, political theory, visual culture, and film studies, they show how biopolitics and geopolitics produce norms of social life and land use that delegitimize and target Indigenous bodies, lives, lands, and political formations. Among other topics, the contributors explore the representations of sexual violence against Native women in literature, Indigenous critiques of the carceral state in North America, Indigenous elders’ refusal of dominant formulations of aging, the governance of Indigenous peoples in Guyana, the displacement of Guaraní in Brazil, and the 2016 rule to formally acknowledge a government-to-government relationship between the US federal government and the Native Hawaiian community. Throughout, the contributors contend that Indigenous life and practices cannot be contained and defined by the racialization and dispossession of settler colonialism, thereby pointing to the transformative potential of an Indigenous-centered decolonization. 

Contributors René Dietrich, Jacqueline Fear-Segal, Mishuana Goeman, Alyosha Goldstein, Sandy Grande, Michael R. Griffiths, Shona N. Jackson, Kerstin Knopf, Sabine N. Meyer, Robert Nichols, Mark Rifkin, David Uahikeaikaleiʻohu Maile

René Dietrich is Senior Lecturer in American Studies at the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt and author of Revising and Remembering (after) the End: American Post-Apocalyptic Poetry Since 1945 from Ginsberg to Forché.

Kerstin Knopf is Professor of North American and Postcolonial Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Bremen and author of Decolonizing the Lens of Power: Indigenous Films in North America.

Foreword / Alyosha Goldstein  vii
Acknowledgments  xiii
Introduction: The Bio/Geopolitics of Settler States and Indigenous Normativities / René Dietrich  1
1. “You Tell Me Your Stories, and I Will Tell You Mine”: Witnessing and Combating Native Women’s Extirpation in American Indian Literature / Mishuana Goeman  45
2. The Biopolitics of Aging: Indigenous Elders as Elsewhere / Sandy Grande  67
3. The Colonialism of Incarceration / Robert Nichols  85
4. Are Hawaiians Indians? / David Uahikeakalei‘ohu Maile  107
5. Postcolonial Biopolitics and the Hieroglyphs of Democracy / Shona N.Jackson  131
6. Fictions of Land and Flesh: Blackness, Indigeneity, Speculation / Mark Rifkin  159
7. “I Was Nothing but a Bare Skeleton Walking the Path”: Biopolitics, Geopolitics, and Life in Diane Glancy’s Pushing the Bear / Sabine N. Meyer  177
8. Unseen Wonder: Decolonizing Magical Realism in Kim Scott’s Benang and Witi Ihimaera’s “Maata” / Michael R. Griffiths  197
9. Agency and Art: Survivance with Camera and Crayon / Jacqueline Fear-Segal  219
10. Land through the Camera: Post/Colonial Space and Indigenous Struggles in Birdwatchers (Terra Vermelha) / Kerstin Knopf  245
Contributors  273
Index  277