Becoming Indigenous: Governing Imaginaries in the Anthropocene

Throughout the history of colonialism competing representations of the indigenous have been deployed by colonial powers to their own advantages and ends. Historically the indigenous have been represented as belonging to a past temporality in ways that legitimized colonial rule in the present and future.

This book provides a cutting-edge, theoretically innovative, and analytically detailed response to significant developments occurring in the fields of indigenous governance. This book will explore the interfaces between power and indigenous critique by discussing widely articulated attributes of indigenous subjectivity.

The book raises questions about the surfaces of contact between neoliberalism and indigeneity today. We know much by now about the long history of colonial violence that arose from the western desire to transform indigenous peoples on account of their perceived inferiority. We recognize and understand much less of the violence which arises from the purported desire to protect indigenous peoples and ‘the ontological alterity they are said to embody. Yet that is the form, this book asserts, which neoliberal violence towards indigenous peoples now takes.