What if we understood the idea of family as central to representing alternative forms of governance as expressions of racial deviance? In The Politics of Kinship, Mark Rifkin shows how ideologies of family, including notions of kinship, recast Indigenous and other forms of collective self-organization and self-determination as disruptive racial tendencies in need of state containment and intervention. Centering work in Indigenous studies, Rifkin illustrates how conceptions of family and race work together as part of ongoing efforts to regulate, assault, and efface other political orders. The book examines the history of anthropology and its resonances in contemporary queer scholarship, contemporary Indian policy from the 1970s onward, the legal history of family formation and privacy in the United States, and the association of blackness with criminality across US history. In this way, Rifkin seeks to open new possibilities for envisioning what kinds of relations, networks, and formations can and should be seen as governance on lands claimed by the United States.

Mark Rifkin is Professor of English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. He is the author of several books, including Speaking for the People: Native Writing and the Question of Political Form; Fictions of Land and Flesh: Blackness, Indigeneity, Speculation; and Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination, all also published by Duke University Press.

Acknowledgments  vii
Introduction: Enfamilyment, Political Orders, and the Racializing Work of Scale  1
1. Kinship’s Past, Queer Interventions, and Indigenous Futures  43
2. Indian Domesticity, Setter Regulation, and the Limits of the Race/Politics Distinction  93
3. Marriage, Privacy, Sovereignty  145
4. Blackness, Criminaltiy, Governance  199
Coda: Inside/Outside State Forms  257
Notes  271
Bibliography  343
Index  379