The Erotics of Sovereignty: Queer Native Writing in the Era of Self-Determination by Mark Rifkin (review)

Published in 1977, Marxism and Literature advanced one of Raymond Williams’s most influential ideas, what he coined “structures of feeling.” Structures of feeling mark the actively lived and felt processes through which hegemonic social meanings and values are worked out. For Williams, cultural practices like literature are key social forms that reflect and produce these processes. As such, their study provides evidence of the complex lived dimensions of hegemony and the equally complex processes that it produces, including those that are resistant, fleeting, blind, or alternate to its dominant forms.

Mark Rifkin extends these premises to American Indian literature in The Erotics of Sovereignty: Queer Native Writing in the Era of Self-Determination. He offers an “Indigenous structure of feeling” (3) to interpret queer Native writing as an alternate mapping—what he calls here and elsewhere “peoplehood”—of hegemonic social forms that organize the settlement of Indigenous life in the United States and the Native political forms that arise in response to its attending constraints. He discusses a number of key forms that do such work, but pinpoints the uniquely “forceful” (9) power of authenticity in shaping how Native governance is represented and recognized through dominant social categories like “the Indian” and “the tribe.” By way of critiquing the centrality of authenticity in Scott Richard Lyons’s endorsement of tribal self-determination in X-Marks: Native Signatures of Assent (2010), Rifkin argues that queer Native writers positioned on the margins of hegemonic forms like authenticity offer an Indigenous structure of feeling that alternatively highlights the processes of authentication that legitimize (and delegitimize) Native experiences and practices according to how well they align with authentic or “proper” (20) categories and forms that make tribal self-determination possible in the first place. As such, he organizes the four body chapters that comprise the book around the queer Native writings of Qwo-Li Driskill (Cherokee), Deborah Miranda (Esselen), Greg Sarris (Graton Rancheria), and Chrystos (Menominee) to argue that these writers challenge the seeming factuality of authenticity in determining the parameters of Native life, for their lived and felt experiences with authenticity paint a complex picture of how existing structures of domination are experienced as hegemonic, open-ended processes, rather than as indisputably, transhistorically real.

To elaborate on this point, Rifkin also spends time critiquing what he calls the “realist methodology” (22) of literary scholars like Sean Teuton and Craig Womack. For Rifkin, realism treats experience as if it were a stable object. Thus, this approach seeks to reflect existing conditions (the real) by determining how well settler narratives or US imposition reflect the verities of Native life. While Rifkin acknowledges the importance of this intellectual exercise, he argues that it fails to attend to what he calls “ongoing and potentially competing processes of realization” (22). Following Eric Cheyfitz, he likens these processes of realization to “figuration” and “literalization” (14), terms that mark the ways in which forms like authenticity become real, or self-evident, in and through the codification of legal truths, especially truths that are assumed to cohere US superintendence of Indigenous life. These competing processes of realization, figuration, and literalization comprise the field of possibility for hegemonic social forms to gain meaning and value. Rifkin theorizes their complex interrelation as metaphorical, for the metaphor indexes structures of feeling that are erased in dominant social forms like self-determination (the metaphor as image instead of material) while also pinpointing that which is literalized by these same forms (the metaphor as a critical method for analyzing hegemony).

At the core of these interventions into extant approaches to analyzing American Indian literature is a refreshing, stubborn insistence on foregrounding the “ongoing conditions and legacies of settler occupation” (36) in Native life. Indeed, Rifkin goes to great lengths throughout the book to demonstrate that settler colonialism is an “intimate part of Indigenous experience” (36), an assertion that leads...