Author Meets Critics: David Myer Temin’s "Remapping Sovereignty"

Session Submission Type: Author meet critics

Session Description

David Myer Temin’s Remapping Sovereignty: Decolonization and Self-Determination in North American Indigenous Thought shows how activist-thinkers from Indigenous societies in North America recast the relationship between (de)colonization and sovereignty over the course of the 20th century. Political theorists and political scientists have frequently criticized sovereignty as the dominant paradigm of political authority. Alternatives to sovereignty, however, remain elusive and contested. Recasting these debates, Remapping Sovereignty argues that sovereignty is a concept born of and entangled with white supremacy, settler colonialism, and empire. Therefore, creating alternatives to—remapping—both the institutions of the sovereign-state and the very conceptual framework of sovereignty entails decolonization, meaning dismantling and repairing the structural hierarchies and conceptual frameworks that stem from these constitutive histories of white supremacy, settler colonialism, and empire.

Bridging intellectual histories and conceptual analysis by way of extensive archival research, Temin’s book shows how key figures in Indigenous anticolonial struggles reshaped the philosophical substance, collective agencies, and normative goals of the 20th century global languages of self-determination and decolonization. Offering in-depth interpretations of activist-intellectuals such as Zitkala-Ša (Yankton Dakota), Ella Deloria (Yankton Dakota), Vine Deloria Jr. (Yankton Dakota), George Manuel (Secwépmec), Lee Maracle (Stó:lō), and Howard Adams (Métis), Remapping Sovereignty contends that these thinkers—badly neglected in academic political theory—help to reimagine anticolonialism as a politics of earthmaking. Whereas theorists have increasingly turned to worldmaking to comprehend anticolonial projects exceeding the nation-state, earthmaking offers a paradigm of anticolonialism that responds to the imposition of colonial sovereignty as a gendered form of earth-destroying violence. Understood as earthmaking, decolonizing practices aim to structurally transform institutions and social relations so as to create reciprocity-oriented relationships between humans and the earth. All this is bound together with the task of resurging Indigenous self-determination by creating a pluralistic world order that dethrones the normative and practical centrality of territorialized sovereignty. Altogether, Remapping Sovereignty furnishes a historically grounded decolonial critique and alternative constructive vision of states and sovereignty, internationalism, global justice, political ecology, planetary order, and anticolonial thought itself.

This author-meets-critics panel will bring together scholars that will debate the interventions this book makes into several fields, including: political theories of empire and imperialism and global anticolonial and comparative political thought; critical Indigenous studies and intellectual and political histories of Indigenous peoples; white supremacy and settler colonialism in US and Canadian politics and political thought; and political theories of sovereignty, citizenship, and internationalism.

Sub Unit

• Division 2: Foundations of Political Theory

Cosponsor

• Related Groups / Indigenous Studies Network

Chair

• Adam J. Dahl University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Presenters

• David Temin University of Michigan

• Jane A. Gordon University of Connecticut, Storrs

• Angelica Maria Bernal University of Massachusetts, Amherst

• Burke Hendrix University of Oregon

• Timothy Bowers Vasko Barnard College of Columbia University