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  • Settler Common Sense: Queerness and Everyday Colonialism in the American Renaissance by Mark Rifkin
  • Gregory D. Smithers
Mark Rifkin. Settler Common Sense: Queerness and Everyday Colonialism in the American Renaissance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. 320 pp. Paper, $25.00.

Mark Rifkin has carved out an impressive list of insightful analyses of the Native American experience and settler colonialism over the past decade. [End Page 343] In his most recent work, Settler Common Sense, Rifkin showcases his theoretical skills and analytical depth by exploring how the “quotidian” aspects of settler colonialism permeated the creation of American institutions and in turn excised “Native networks” of both knowledge and being from the “historical landscape” (xv, xvii, 9).

Rifkin's determination to challenge “concepts of place, politics, and personhood” that are “normalized in the settler-state's engagement with Indigenous people” has him effectively deploy queer theory in analyzing the writings of Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Melville (25). The writings of these authors, Rifkin contends, reveal not how they “manifest Indian figures” but how European American territorial possession came to be written in to American culture as normative, while Indigenous peoples’ subjectivities and experiences of colonial violence and dispossession are effaced amid the European American creation of imagined and “racialized” Indian identities (8, 15, 31). Specifically, Rifkin reveals how feeling, or “settler sensation,” enabled these authors to represent forms of settler common sense that enveloped Native North America in a continual and “systemic” dispossession—a dispossession that remains with us in the twenty-first century (10–12, 17).

Through his insightful reading of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables, Henry David Thoreau's Walden, and Herman Melville's Pierre, Rifkin presents a sustained and thoroughly convincing argument for “how settler colonialism operates when Native people(s) are not in the picture, how it functions as an ordinary mode of framing and experience” (191). Indeed, Rifkin is clear in stating that although these canonical texts do not directly engage with, much less focus on, Native American peoples, all reveal how the legal and administrative structures of settler colonialism frame settlement as an ongoing phenomenon that effectively erases Indigenous people.

Rifkin reveals the processes and structures involved in Native American dispossession in how Hawthorne invokes Lockean notions of labor and landownership. In his romantic treatment of labor and land, Hawthorne effaces Native title—the “Indian deed”–by underscoring the primacy of the settler's toil in nature, a form of labor that makes “empty” land productive and trumps any Indigenous claims to sovereignty (58, 74–75).

Thoreau, Rifkin demonstrates, takes a different approach in articulating a form of colonial dispossession. In Walden, Thoreau portrays [End Page 344] Indianness as a simplified existence. This serves Thoreau's purpose of critiquing American civilization and its burgeoning capitalist economy. However, Rifken demonstrates how Thoreau used this literary framework to refigure nineteenth-century anxieties about “dissipation”— specifically, moralist fears of how onanism drains the male body—to postulate that the desire for company constitutes a form of insanity. Thus, in figuring Indigenous people as existing in an imagined wilderness, Thoreau imagines fictional “noble savages,” the cultural counterweights to the antebellum ethos of bourgeois homemaking (115).

In his analysis of Melville's Pierre, Rifkin provides one final and compelling example of how nineteenth-century European American concepts of indigeneity and nature embedded settler common sense in American popular culture. Melville situates Native American displacement and dispossession in the past, a relic of a bygone era with little direct relation to the urban present of Melville's world. Indeed, the “stranger sociability” that Melville writes approvingly of as defining the urban experience in American cities and that makes the genealogical property-holding traditions of New York's rural elite seem as anachronistic as Native American landholding practices serves to effectively erase the Native past in Pierre (155, 190–91).

Settler Common Sense is a profoundly insightful book that deserves a wide readership. Written with the grace and depth that we have become accustomed to from Mark Rifkin, this book is as timely as much as it is a triumph of literary analysis. [End Page 345]

Gregory D. Smithers
Virginia Commonwealth University

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