Arriving on a Different Shore: US Empire at Its Horizons

As settler-colonial studies makes inroads into the methodologies shaping the evolving field of global Indigenous studies, a curious thing has happened. Where once the local and the discrete marked the singularity of disciplined studies, there are now calls for trans- and inter-cultural, indigenous, minoritarian, and disciplinary analyses to account for the differences that subjectivities and subject positions make within the violences of racialization and colonization. In the context of the United States, the nation-state formation that makes the comparative scope of the essays gathered here cohere, histories of racialization and colonization have often been assumed to signify the same thing. Regardless of the specific label used to describe historical oppression, both are assumed to be the same systematic process of othering that leads to incarceration, dispossession, disenfranchisement, and alienation within and away from the larger sociopolitical communities reserved for only a select few.