mark rifkin

Professor Mark Rifkin
Scholar of Indigenous Studies, Queer and Trans Studies, and U.S. Literary Studies

Research

I am a professor in the Global Gender and Sexuality Studies Department at the University at Buffalo. My research primarily focuses on Native American writing and politics from the eighteenth century onward, exploring the ways that Indigenous peoples have negotiated U.S. racial and imperial formations. I explore the roles of gender, sexuality, affect, and eroticism in those dynamics, addressing legal and administrative frameworks, textual representations, and forms of everyday experience. I also have written extensively about the relations among varied processes of racialization in the context of U.S. empire.

The Politics of Kinship:

Race, Family, Governance

What if we understood the idea of family as central to representing alternative forms of governance as expressions of racial deviance? The Politics of Kinship shows how ideologies of family recast Indigenous and other forms of collective self-organization and self-determination as disruptive racial tendencies in need of state containment and intervention.

Speaking for the People

Native Writing and the Question of Political Form

Speaking for the People examines nineteenth-century Native writings to reframe contemporary debates around Indigenous recognition, refusal, and resurgence. It shows how works by nineteenth-century Native authors illustrate the intellectual labor involved in representing modes of Indigenous political identity and placemaking.

Fictions of Land and Flesh

Blackness, Indigeneity, Speculation

In Fictions of Land and Flesh Mark Rifkin explores the impasses that arise in seeking to connect Black and Indigenous movements, turning to speculative fiction to understand those difficulties and envision productive ways of addressing them.

Beyond Settler Time

Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination

What does it mean to say that Native peoples exist in the present? Beyond Settler Time investigates the dangers of seeking to include Indigenous peoples within settler temporal frameworks.

Settler Common Sense

Queerness and Everyday Colonialism in the American Renaissance

The book explores how some of the most canonical of American writers take part in the legacy of displacing Native Americans. It shows how these texts’ queer imaginings rely on treating settler notions of place and personhood as self-evident, erasing the advancing expropriation and occupation of Native lands.

The Erotics of Sovereignty

Queer Native Writing in the Era of Self-Determination

The Erotics of Sovereignty looks at how contemporary queer Native writers use representations of sensation to challenge official U.S. accounts of Native identity. It illustrates how these authors affirm the significance of the erotic as an exercise of individual and community sovereignty.

When Did Indians Become Straight?

Kinship, the History of Sexuality, and Native Sovereignty

The book explores the complex relationship between contested U.S. notions of normality and shifting forms of Native American governance and self-representation.

Manifesting America

The Imperial Construction of U.S. National Space

The book explores the creation and extension of U.S. jurisdiction in the antebellum period, particularly over Native Americans and former Mexicans.

CV

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Reviews

Presentations and Podcasts