Abstract

Abstract:

This article argues that in Indian Nullification and A Son of the Forest, William Apess uses an antinomian practice of nullification to link together Indigenous and Black struggles for decolonization and abolition in the 1830s. The article reimagines the Puritan concept of antinomianism, the idea that because God gives grace freely one need not adhere to civil law, in order to describe a rejection of the very premises of the laws that have constitutively denied protection to Indigenous and Black Americans. The formal and textual politics of these writings challenge settler normalizations of private property in both land and in persons, which were used to dispossess and enslave Indigenous and Black persons. Apess's strategic deployments of settler law and settler religion are radical decolonial practices, which both point out and undermine the injustices written into American law.

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