Inhabiting the End of Empire: Resistant Spatial Survivals and the Time of Settler Dispossession

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

The recently accelerated genocidal actions by Israel in collaboration with the US were an attempt to impose a western humanist, settler temporal order on Gaza and, by extension, the rest of Palestine, to lay claim to the land once and for all through temporal normalization hammered into the ground by bombs. Following Steven Salaita in The Holy Land in Transit, Israel functioning in lock step with the US empire reflects back an anticolonial critical perspective on the US. The “American empire,’ like Israel, is grounded first and foremost in settler colonialism, which makes inhabiting the empire a distinctly temporal problem, one exacerbated by historicist narratives of the empire’s end. One cannot, for instance, talk about the end of the empire without talking about its beginning, a beginning that has remained persistently unresolved; that is, one cannot talk about the end of the American empire without talking about the role Indigenous people play in this end, about the way they have made it permanently temporary from its inception, its end a foregone conclusion.

The US still has and will have a Native American problem, just as Israel has and will have a Palestinian problem. And these problems will not be solved by enhanced Native sovereignty or Palestinian statehood: they are rather perpetually open wounds that reference the impossibility of a naturalized nationhood/natality for the settler and the openness of the time of dispossession; they are wounds that ooze time differently. As Elizabeth Povinelli has shown with her concept of the governance of the prior and Grant Farred has shown with his concept of the unsettler, who roots into the land to manage time, colonial settlement is as much about time as about the production of land as property, which has led to deeply paradoxical temporal relations to the Native. Jodi Byrd has discussed the fact that the US empire cannot be understood without beginning with settler colonialism through the reiterative figure of the transit of indianness, that the value produced by Indigenous people is to simply go away. The obverse of this is Nasser Abourahme’s concept of settlerness, “the way by which the recursive but endless task of dispossession-settlement both forms its own political imperative and is shaped by anticolonial refusal in ways that open up temporal contradictions.” Settlerness is defined by its dynamism as well as inertia, its arrogance and anxiety, its territorial expansiveness which conditions feelings of besiegement, in a word, its unsettledness.

This panel will focus on the Indigenous temporal practices in settler-produced spaces that have survived with and through practices of erasure, dispossession, and genocide, practices that may facilitate the end of empire through exploiting its very unsettledness and mark a path of endurance to outlast it. Such openings onto temporal disjunctions created by settlerness allow us to locate the settler state’s points of strategic vulnerability precisely in questions of the attempted permanence and endurance of the impossible project of settler nationalization/natalization/indigenization.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Nour Joudah, University of California-Los Angeles

Panelists

• Melanie Yazzie, University of Minnesota Twin Cities

• Nasser Abourahme, Bowdoin College

• Mark Minch-de Leon, University of California-Riverside

Biographical Information

1. Melanie K. Yazzie is Assistant Professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities (UMN). She specializes in American Indian history, Diné/Navajo studies, environmental studies & political ecology, queer & feminist studies, social & political movements, urban Native studies, social & political theory, carcerality and policing, and media studies. She has received numerous distinguished fellowships. From 2018-2019 she was the Katrin H. Lamon Residential Scholar at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She has also held a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship, Andrew W. Mellon Dissertation Fellowship, and Ford Foundation Diversity Predoctoral Fellowship.

With Dr. Nick Estes, she guest edited a special issue of Wicazo Sa Review in 2016 on the legacy of Dakota scholar Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, one of the founders of American Indian studies. She also co-edited a special issue of Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, and Society in 2018 with Dr. Cutcha Risling-Baldy on Indigenous peoples and the politics of water. She is a past board member of Diné Studies Conference, Inc. and currently serves on the advisory board of the Center for Race, Indigeneity, Disability, Gender and Sexuality at UMN.

She is coauthor of Red Nation Rising: From Bordertown Violence to Native Liberation (PM Press) and The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save the Earth (Common Notions/Red Media), both of which came out in 2021. She co-hosts and produces the podcast series Red Power Hour, which is sponsored by Red Media, a Native-led media organization she co-founded in 2019. She also does community organizing with The Red Nation, a grassroots Native-run organization she co-founded in 2014. Through The Red Nation, she engages in public intellectual and activist work on the intersections between Indigenous people and environmental justice, water rights, gender and sexuality, policing and incarceration, housing justice, urban experience, and internationalism.

2. Nour Joudah is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian American Studies at UCLA and a former President’s and Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Geography at UC-Berkeley (2022-23). Dr. Joudah completed her PhD in Geography at UCLA (2022), and wrote her dissertation Mapping Decolonized Futures: Indigenous Visions for Hawaii and Palestine on the efforts by Palestinian and native Hawaiian communities to imagine and work toward liberated futures while centering indigenous duration as a non-linear temporality. Her work examines mapping practices and indigenous survival and futures in settler states, highlighting how indigenous countermapping is a both cartographic and decolonial praxis. She also has a MA in Arab Studies from Georgetown University, and wrote her MA thesis on the role and perception of exile politics within the Palestinian liberation struggle, in particular among politically active Palestinian youth living in the United States and occupied Palestine.

3. Mark Minch-de Leon (he/him) is an antidisciplinary and anticolonial scholar who works at the intersections of Native American and Indigenous Studies, Rhetorical Theory, and Narrative and Visual Studies. His recent work has focused on reorienting California Indian studies away from the institutional and disciplinary study of Native peoples, a position that reinforces settler colonial and western humanist modes of knowledge production, to centering California Indian modes of resistance and survival, ontologies, and intellectual sovereignty as the primary forms of knowledge in the place currently called “California.” He is a member of the Susanville Indian Rancheria and co-founder of the California Indian Studies and Scholars Association as well as an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at UC Riverside and Director of the California Center for Native Nations. His book, Indigenous Inhumanities: California Indian Studies After the Apocalypse, is forthcoming from University of Minnesota Press as part of the Indigenous Americas series in Fall 2025.

4. Nasser Abourahme is a writer and teacher who works between colonial history, political theory, and border and migration studies. He’s the author of The Time beneath the Concrete: Palestine between Camp and Colony published in 2025 by Duke University Press. Nasser is currently Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern and North African Studies at Bowdoin College.