In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Afterword
  • Sharon P. Holland (bio)

What I got you gotta get it put it in you

—Red Hot Chili Peppers

Queer studies is at a crossroads —and so is critical discourse, for that matter. In a post-Foucault, post-Derrida, whatever-happened-to-subaltern-studies moment, without something new coming down the pike, we are looking for a new thesis for these political times. Queer of color critique and black queer studies didn't seem to do the trick for queer studies' turn to whiteness, and neither did postpositive realism.1 The constant tapping at the back door of queer studies' investment in its color-bound but not color-blind subject hasn't done all that much to change the direction of the discourse. Nevertheless, in this collection of essays, the authors don't necessarily answer the question "where to now?"; rather, they remind us during the turn to the transnational that there are nations within these United States and that these international peoples and their literatures are a founding constituency in the project we call "American studies" and one of its theoretical homes: LGBTQ theory. The intention here is not just to interrogate the "object" of queer studies but to change the direction of Native American studies as well. To this end, this special issue is an ambitious one, and it stands out not only because the voices here are so crisp and critically engaged but also because there is a fair amount of subtle disagreement in these pages. It is as if the writers here hold native and queer studies in a kind of critical refraction and allow for the prism of thought created by that refraction to guide their queries. It is because of the richness of this endeavor and the several questions it leaves me with that I depart from the generalized and often celebratory genre that is the afterword and provide a more detailed discussion of the contribution each essay makes.

As the editors of this issue have observed, queer Native studies offers a floundering queer studies project fodder for the next generation of publications in [End Page 285] queer studies. It is clear from reading the essays here that a thoroughgoing critique of "settler sexuality" and settler colonialism is overdue in queer studies, even though such a critique has the potential to shift the nineteenth-century historical grounding of queer studies in a nascent "homosexuality" or in a "homosocial" platonic public to the biopolitical emergence of what is now called the United States. The challenge is certainly here. Whether queer studies will answer is yet to be seen (come out, come out wherever you are). I have serious doubts that what-its-got-they're-gonna-wanna-put-it-in-them. Nevertheless, I do want to comment briefly on my own location, as my readings here take into consideration the "conversation" that may or may not be taking place among queer studies/theory, Native studies, black (queer) studies, African American studies, transnational studies, and queer of color critique. This afterword is an effort to bring other voices to the table, as my work in American studies across disciplinary homes has enriched my own understanding of the need for more interactive conversations. Because so many of these conversations are not occurring —we tend to color within the lines rather than ignore the outline on the page altogether —interventionist collections and methodologies tend to produce disciplinary "homes" as monoliths. That tendency can be seen here in the production of native studies as a certain mode of inquiry, without attention to those discursive ventures from within that destabilize an often neat racial project of belonging. To this end, for example, it is surprising not to see the scholarly work of "Afro-Native studies" represented here, since so many of its theorizations about community, home, and nation could have been useful to this collection.2

This collection queries the grounding of Indian criticism and its attendant nationalist bent by reimagining and contesting, as with Sarah Dowling's essay on the gay Mohawk poet James Thomas Stevens, the place of "contact" as a historical and discursive field for Indian studies. Dowling writes: "Stevens lifts contact from its historically specific...

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