Chapter one of my book, “Archives and The Politics of Sovereignty Violence,” is done!! I rage-wrote a good chunk of it. I ended up putting a section about some of the real-time acts of sovereignty violence that the US government is committing against its citizens (e.g. ICE, Epstein Files Cover-Up, mass firings across cultural heritage).
To celebrate, here’s the chapter abstract. 😃 Chapter one is introductory, but also a standalone piece about sovereignty violence (unresolved violence upheld by settler state law, regimes, and mechanisms of exclusion to uphold power over communities).
Chapter 1: Why Archives and Tribal Sovereignty Politics?
Decolonization in archives is often cast as an undoing process or as determining the limits of ongoing colonization of Indigenous peoples. “Archives and The Politics of Tribal Sovereignty Violence” challenges this emphasis, exploring how archival politics surrounding decolonization are haunted by the ever-changing complexities of modernity that demand ongoing acts of sovereign violence. In archives, decolonization–the active and metaphorical shattering of colonial structures (institutions, logic, workflows)–is in conflict with the United States’ (US) sovereignty violence by reinscribing and sustaining four fictitious myths the settler state pushes as fact. As the nexus for societal structures, archival praxis is a mechanism through which settler colonial fictions are reproduced. Grounded in US tribal politics, this book critically examines the deep-rooted connection between US settler state politics and tribal sovereignty from the lens of archival work. It traces the political-economic impacts on tribal sovereignty in direct connection with archival efforts to decolonize recordkeeping.