Modern Language Review

It may seem like something of a redundancy to describe this superb collection of essays as ‘necessary and urgent’ given that it was published at the very beginning [End Page 252] of the infernal summer of 2023. Yet, the point must be made. Indeed, the editor’s bid to offer a ‘linked theorization of biopolitics and geopolitics that considers how life itself is valued (or discounted) within [. . .] exploitative and extractivist settler structures’ (p. 14) has possibly never seemed more essential than it does in this, the ‘era of global boiling’ (The Guardian, 27 July 2023). These essays reveal the extent to which the horrors of international humanitarian crises, wildfires from Canada and Maui to Greece, and near countless human rights violations against Indigenous peoples are as closely intertwined as they are ongoing. Examining the hegemonic power structures that have created these circumstances, René Dietrich, Kerstin Knopf, and their contributors cogently assert that these abuses and crises are, quite simply, the culmination of the slow violence that has been witnessed and experienced by Indigenous groups and populations for decades, both globally and historically. In examining the causes of what may appear to be the ‘shock’ of environmental collapse for some, and the breakdown of what Dietrich calls the ‘assumed natural course and order of life’ for others, the contributors expose both the ongoing destructiveness and the structuredness of the controlling norms established by numerous settler states (Dietrich, ‘Introduction: Settler Colonial Biopolitics and Indigenous Lifeways’, American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 42.2(2018), 1–10 (p. 2)). The book carefully threads a line of continuity that links environmental devastation and other forms of colonial extractivism to modes of detention, dislocation, extirpation, exclusion, and invisibilization. Each of the essays subsequently plays a vital role in demonstrating the pervasive and pernicious patrolling of lands and people that has brought us to the boiling point that the secretary-general of the United Nations, António Guterres, has spoken about. Crucially, as well as offering a much-needed and sophisticated critique of settler-colonial normativities—hence revealing often overlooked harms created within various geopolitical contexts—this collection theorizes and prioritizes ‘the political significance of Indigenous-centred epistemologies that conceives [sic] of all forms of life and being in relationality’ (p. 19). By decentring and deconstructing the dominant, often deleterious, social and political models that have held sway in much of the colonized world, the writers assembled here remind us that there are many other ways of being. Moreover, they testify to the fact that the kinds of environmental damage and humanitarian crises that are currently alarming the world’s general population are the result of praxes that are neither ‘natural’ for, nor new to, Indigenous peoples. This book has a usefulness and range which is itself reflective of the breadth and dynamism of Indigenous Studies today; it moves between a very great number of disciplines (‘literary and cultural studies, political theory, [and] age studies’ (pp. 26, 27), among others), and features contributions that focus on the Americas, Aotearoa/New Zealand, and Australia as well as Hawai’i. Responding to settler colonialism in all its forms, Dietrich’s Introduction and the ten essays that follow coalesce in their studied consideration of Indigenous sovereignties, resistance, and renewal.

Highlights include Mishuana Goeman’s searing examination of ‘the peril of being an Indian woman in the spaces controlled by the settler state’ (p. 59). Goeman [End Page 253] provides a compelling assessment of the legal, political, and social structures that have served to perpetuate and virtually normalize atrocious forms of sexual and physical violence against Indigenous woman. Powerfully linking the denial of physical safety and corporeal autonomy to other forms of ‘Indigenous dispossession and removal’, she examines the restorative nature of storytelling and the power of narrative sovereignty and witnessing (ibid.). Shona Jackson’s meditation on the government of Guyana’s passing of the Amerindian...