Thursday, April 24, 2014 3:00 PM EDT
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Henry David Thoreau’s Walden critiques dominant forms of property ownership and homemaking, developing a liberatory -- and masturbatory -- vision of withdrawal into the wilderness. His conception of “Nature,” though, turns spaces from which Native peoples have been dispossessed into sites for non-native regeneration, and in doing so, Thoreau’s countercultural (queer) ethics implicitly depends on and contributes to the ongoing dynamics of U.S. settler colonialism.
Mark Rifkin is Associate Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He is the author of four books, most recently Settler Common Sense: Queerness and Everyday Colonialism in the American Renaissance (forthcoming 2014) and The Erotics of Sovereignty: Queer Native Writing in the Era of Self-Determination. He currently serves as President-Elect of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association.
