Fire and Flood: Settler Colonialism and Pessimistic Indigenous Futurisms

• In Event: The Colonial Fantasy of American Futurities

Abstract

In Red Skin, White Masks, Glen Coulthard enjoins indigenous resurgence to embrace anger, resentment, and other affective stances of pessimistic refusal as the means through which to resist the conciliatory gestures offered by the colonizing settler state to maintain its power. The settler state, meanwhile, returns such indigenous refusals by postponing indigenous presences as never-quite arrived and long past due. Caught within the both/and of dystopic collapse, the colonial fantasies of American futurities often reproduce themselves through nineteenth-century signs of the struggle for colonial dominance. Assuming that Chicago remains unoccupied by the Feds, this talk will close read HBO’s Westworld alongside Blake M. Hausman’s Riding the Trail of Tears to consider how the machinic and procedural elements of technological play produce dystopic visions of American collapse as the failure of indigenous futures.

Author

• Jodi Byrd, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign