Reviews
“The Politics of Kinship is a new and exciting contribution to the field that raises productive questions about the relationship and distinction between family and kinship. As part of his larger project, developing a queer critique of settler colonialism, Mark Rifkin here homes in on discourses of family and kinship to examine how these conversations have often elided underlying questions of governance and sovereignty.
Manu Karuka, author of, Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous
Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad
"Rifkin convincingly demonstrates that the "dialectic of absorption and assent" framed U.S. imperial nationalism."
Western Historical Quarterly
“Distinctly and importantly drawing on Indigenous intellectual frames in order to rethink racialization in the United States, Mark Rifkin makes a powerful contribution to the robust body of scholarship on family, kinship, and race. The Politics of Kinship is a fantastic book.”
Jennifer C. Nash, author of, How We Write Now
Living with Black Feminist Theory Speaking for the People
“Mark Rifkin examines important nineteenth-century Native literary figures' engagement with settler publics by laying out a nuanced introspection of their ‘portraits of peoplehood’ during tumultuous contexts and the costs of such representativity that foster tension in the present day. He resituates the discussion of recognition to this earlier period in order to detour from a settler stronghold on political definitions still used to impact the daily life of Indigenous peoples. Delving deep into the political spheres of violence and the nuanced political forms of Indigenous life that emerge, Rifkin gives us further grounds to explore the foundations and formations of slippery recognition politics.”
Mishuana Goeman, Professor of Gender Studies and American Indian Studies,
University of California, Los Angeles
“Presenting new, insightful, nuanced, and persuasive readings of four key figures in nineteenth-century Native American literature, Speaking for the People is both timely and poised to become a classic study in Native and Indigenous studies, anthropology, and American literary studies. An interdisciplinary tour de force.”
Birgit Brander Rasmussen, author of, Queequeg’s Coffin
Indigenous Literacies and Early American Literature
"Speaking for the People is as useful for scholars and students of contemporary indigenous studies as it is for those pursuing the study of 19th-century literature, politics, and indigenous peoples. Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty."
J. J. Donahue, Choice
"In Speaking for the People Mark Rifkin contributes to the ongoing critical conversation regarding Indigenous recognition. In richly historicized chapters he questions the process of how Indigenous leaders . . . consciously stage the 'legitimacy of their entry' into the discursive frameworks of coloniality."
Caitlin Simmons, Western American Literature
"Speaking for the People reasserts the usefulness and relevance of literary studies in fashioning Indigenous political theory. Rifkin demonstrates how nineteenth-century Native texts have had to navigate settler worldings to express peoplehood and how their intellectual labor of negotiatedness should inspire present-day scholarship. His demonstration is as compelling as it is unsettling."
Mathilde Louette, Transatlantica
"Speaking for the People . . . is valuable for literary scholars and Indigenous scholars alike to articulate the complexity of Indigenous activism in a settler state."
Alison Russell, New England Quarterly
"Speaking for the People has generated a rich set of coordinates and queries for analyzing nineteenth-century Native writing, and Rifkin’s readings model how these questions take us deep into nineteenth-century Native political discussions while resonating in contemporary NAIS scholarship."
Kelly Wisecup, Native American and Indigenous Studies
“Fictions of Land and Flesh considers the points at which Black and Indigenous studies might relate across histories and struggles. It does so with an eye toward the necessity of that engagement and the danger of conflating the urgencies that constitute those histories and struggles. With characteristic brilliance and creativity, Mark Rifkin turns to Black and Indigenous futurist work as a way to produce that difficult but necessary dialogue.”
Roderick A. Ferguson, author of One-Dimensional Queer
Fictions of Land and Flesh
“Anchored in the contemporary movements of #NoDAPL and Black Lives Matter, Fictions of Land and Flesh is a welcome and expert guide to thinking through the resonances and impasses that attend Black and Indigenous articulations of justice. Essential reading in American studies.”
Beth H. Piatote, author of Domestic Subjects:
Gender, Citizenship, and Law in Native American Literature
"Rifkin engages artfully the works of Octavia Butler, Walter Mosley, Nalo Hopkinson, Andrea Hairston, Melissa Tantaquidgeon Zobel, Drew Hayden Taylor, and Mari Karisato, in addition to other theoretical conversation partners, to analyze the social-political imaginaries of belonging and placemaking, fugitivity and marronage, landlessness and sovereignty, governance and self-determination."
Sakena Young Scaggs, Native American and Indigenous Studies
Beyond Settler Time
"Rifkin offers the compelling argument that challenging normative settler time engenders new possibilities for Native articulations of futurity."
Stephanie Lumsden, Studies in American Indian Literatures
"Rifkin’s book presents a novel and ambitious perspective in analysing the process of land dispossession and forced assimilation of Native Americans during the consolidation of the U.S. national state in the nineteenth century and its afterlife."
Carolina Aguilera, Ethnic and Racial Studies
"A theoretically robust and intellectually satisfying work that challenges readers to think differently not only about the past, but also about time. . . . A welcome addition to the robust body of interdisciplinary writing that has become renowned for its thick descriptions of space and place. . . . Rifkin’s approach is innovative, his analysis is theoretically sophisticated, the scaffolding upon which his analysis hangs is inspiring, and the vocabulary he advances is both useful and empowering."
Kieth Thor Carlson, American Historical Review
"Rifkin’s work moves us toward a more expansive understanding of the ways in which collective memory, ceremonial practices, prophesy, oral traditions, and place- based knowledges inform Indigenous corpo-realities and shape quotidian experiences of synchronously felt pasts, presents, and futures. This text is a critical addition to Native American studies and should be read by all striving for a decolonial future."
Sarah Whitt, American Indian Quarterly
"It is impossible in a brief review to do justice to the full richness of Beyond Settler Time. Rifkin is meticulous in positioning his own work in relation to other scholarship, and while at times this forces the reader to work through the extant discourse surrounding a particular novel or text to get at the new interpretive kernel, that work is always rewarding. . . . Beyond Settler Time is a valuable contribution to the field of indigenous studies."
David J. Carlson, Journal of American Studies
"Beyond Settler Time provides a necessary and important intervention in theorizations of time in Native American literature and history. Rifkin presents a set of analytic tools that scholars can employ when engaging Indigenous texts with temporal formations, shedding light upon crucial differences in Native American conceptions of time, place, and becoming."
Penelope Kelsey, Western American Literature
Settler Common Sense
"A sophisticated and rigorous interdisciplinary work, Settler Common Sense is a wonderful, unsettling contribution to American literary studies, native studies, and queer studies."
Beth Piatote, University of California, Berkeley
"A useful starting point for further analysis, laying the groundwork for future scholars to explore how a variety of cultural products—if subtly—encouraged the dispossession of Native Americans during one of the US’s most important periods of physical growth and ideological development."
CHOICE
"Rifkin presents clear, fascinating, and focused readings of texts that offer new questions for how queer studies tools can be used in connection with ethics (queer and Indigenous) to read foundational literary texts."
American Literature
"A useful starting point for further analysis, laying the groundwork for future scholars to explore how a variety of cultural products—if subtly—encouraged the dispossession of Native Americans during one of the US’s most important periods of physical growth and ideological development."
CHOICE
"Offers an important reminder of the expropriation and erasure on which nineteenth-century American culture was built, even after 'Indians' have ostensibly vanished from areas like New England and New York."
Modern Philology
The Erotics of Sovereignty
"When did Indians become straight? When we started pretending to be, with and without the help of those who would straighten us. Let's stop pretending or let's get crooked and pretend something better. Let's read Mark Rifkin's book that combines the best of historical inquiry, literary/theoretical analysis, and thinking outside straight lines in ways that confront us with the power of deviant views of familiar, and some unfamiliar, texts and policies."
Craig Womack, author of Drowning in Fire
"Mark Rifkin's When Did Indians Become Straight? provides an exciting and astute account of the relation between the erosion of Native sovereignty and the 'straightening' of sexualities in the history of the U.S. as settler-nation, from James Fenimore Cooper to Leslie Feinberg and Craig Womack. This is a major contribution to a meeting of the waters between Native Studies and Sexuality Studies."
Michael Moon, Professor and Director of American Studies, Emory University
"In asking 'When did Indians become straight?', Mark Rifkin isn't simply being provocative: he's setting the critical foundation for what is undoubtedly the most incisive, well-researched, respectful, and thoroughly engaging study of sexuality and gender in American Indian literature, and one of the best works of criticism in the field in recent years."
Daniel Heath Justice, Associate Professor of English, University of Toronto
"The ideas contained in Rifkin's book are fresh, provocative, and vital to understanding the American past, present and future."
"When Did Indians Become Straight? is a groundbreaking study of the uses of the native in the making of critical theory and national belonging."
Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Professor of Anthropology & Gender Studies, Columbia University
"Brilliant...The book is well researched, with rigorous and nuanced analysis and sophisticated theorization. Successfully spanning the entirety of U.S. history from the early republic to the early twenty-first century, this book is nothing short of a major feat, making serious contributions to American studies as well as literary studies, Native and Indigenous studies, queer studies, and anthropology."
"A theoretically rich text...An expansive study."
American Indian Quarterly
"A towering achievement in two fields, American Indian studies and sexuality studies, and ought to be celebrated as paradigm shifting for both areas of study."
"Manifesting America is an important innovative work that will provoke argument and inspire emulation. Each chapter is compelling and rich in its interweaving of textual readings, history, and theory."-
Amy Kaplan, University of Pennsylvania
"These steady-handed, often tough-minded readings document a genealogy of the interconnections between American Indian and Mexican-American experiences of American imperialism. Drawing on subaltern studies to great intellectual advantage, Mark Rifkin in Manifesting America innovates, re-imagines, and creates new pathways toward including indigeneity in American studies."-
Robert Warrior, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
"Manifesting America skillfully reorients American studies from its current fascination with the transnational, spotlighting instead processes through which the U.S. incorporated Indigenous and Mexican peoples and their lands into its national imaginary. Rifkin's attention to this discursive naturalization of U.S. authority as non-coercive reinvigorates the critique of empire-building at home."
Chadwick Allen
The Ohio State University
"Rifkin's study offers a critical genealogy of the dialectic of incorporation and acquiescence that persists as a central element of U.S. imperial nationalism. This path-breaking study will be widely read and discussed by scholars in American history, Native American studies, and American literary studies."
Donald E. Pease, Dartmouth College
"Compels us to think carefully of the rhetorical and legal legerdemain of imperial conquest and the centrality of language in the making of the United States as a hegemonic power. "
Southwestern Historical Quarterly
"Meticulously researched and sweeping in scope, Rifkin's book points us toward the many rewards not only of reading critically nonfictional texts within their communities but also of reading their communities within a richly complicated and cosmopolitan regional framework that unbounds Native American and literary studies in order to enter a dynamic and piercing engagement with allied areas of inquiry. Fiercely comparative and far-ranging, this book will sharpen debates in graduate seminars and conference panels across the discipline as we more fully integrate literary and nonliterary scholarly projects."
Studies in American Indian Literatures
"Brilliantly conceptualized and argued, Manifesting America is an essential and path-breaking contribution to the fields of Native American studies, Chicano/a-Latino/a studies, border studies, and American studies."
Wicazo Sa Review
"Rifkin's book...brings indigenous presence, culture, and activism to the fore, countering entrenched narratives of invisibility, powerlessness, and acquiescence with persistent and creative resistance to ongoing colonial oppression.
American Literature