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

With The Erotics of Sovereignty, Mark Rifkin, who is fast becoming one of the foremost scholars in queer Native studies, puts out his third monograph and his second that engages the texts and theories of Two-Spirit literatures. The Erotics of Sovereignty follows up 2011's When Did Indians Become Straight? with an extension of Rifkin's highly theorized analyses of indigenous literatures. While When Did Indians Become Straight? looked at the heteronormativity of US Indian policy through an analysis of Native and non-Native texts and queer- and non-queer-identified writers, The Erotics of Sovereignty analyzes queer Native literature exclusively and is, in fact, the first critical monograph to do so.

In his most recent offering, Rifkin reads the work of four queer/Two-Spirit Native writers/theorists: Qwo-Li Driskill (Cherokee), Deborah Miranda (Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen Nation/Chumash), Greg Sarris (Granton Ranchería), and Chrystos (Menominee). In a hallmark of queer Native studies, Rifkin melds discussions of sovereignty and sexuality, arguing that these texts' configurations of indigenous nationhood can be read through the lens of affect and, particularly, through Raymond Williams's concept of a "structure of feeling." As one such affective structure, the "embodied sensations and sensitivities" of erotics provide "a different perspective on—a new metaphor for—practices and histories of peoplehood" (34). Rifkin suggests that this lens extends current understandings of Indigenous nationhood, contending: "By making erotics a way of exploring the contours and dynamics of indigeneity, the authors I address foreground interdependence and vulnerability as positive principles of peoplehood" (35).

Rifkin's first chapter, "The Somatics of Haunting: Embodied Peoplehood in Qwo-Li Driskill's Walking with Ghosts," which was previously published in Qwo-Li Driskill, Chris Finley, Brian Joseph Gilley, and Scott Morgensen's important collection Queer Indigenous Studies: Critical Interventions in Theory, Politics, and Literature (2011), analyzes Driskill's 2005 poetry collection as a counterpoint to two Cherokee Nation legislative decisions. Rifkin highlights the heteronormative narrative of the 2004 Cherokee Nation statute that outlawed same-sex marriage as a violation of tribal tradition and the 2006 constitutional amendment that disenfranchised the Cherokee Freedmen, descendants of African and African American peoples enslaved by Cherokee tribal members prior to 1866, arguing that the latter reinstantiates the logics of US allotment-era policies aimed at detribalization. Rifkin brings Driskill's landmark theory of a "sovereign erotic," which recognizes the imbricated nature of sovereignty and sexuality, into play as a counterpoint to such damaging logics. Rifkin suggests that Driskill refrains from overtly challenging legal understandings of sovereignty in "Stolen from Our Bodies," the essay in which Driskill initially articulates hir theory. However, he contends that Driskill's poetry collection Walking with Ghosts, which was published the following year, functions as just such an intervention. The chapter then presents a careful reading of the collection, demonstrating how Driskill "reshap[es] the contours of what can count as sovereignty … [and] articulates a queer kind of self-determination, registering the primacy of lived connections to land and one's people as mediated by the continuing history of settler violence" (52).

In his second chapter, "Landscapes of Desire: Melancholy, Memory, and Fantasy in Deborah Miranda's The Zen of La Llorona," Rifkin considers how Miranda employs melancholy to challenge and, at times, negate settler policies of recognition that attempt to erase indigenous peoples. Rifkin argues that "After Colonization," a moving piece from Miranda's first collection, Indian Cartography (1999), engages the painful histories of California Indians not through mourning or a lament for that which is gone but instead through what he defines as melancholia. Using Anne Cheng's The Melancholy of Race (2000), Rifkin shows that melancholy, which indexes a continued presence and attachment, functions as a claim for indigenous survivance in Miranda's work. Rifkin then turns, in the remainder of the chapter, to Miranda's 2005 collection, The Zen of La Llorona. While Rifkin...