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Introduction

Once Removed: Genealogies of an Indian Imaginary

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 June 2020

Melanie Benson Taylor
Affiliation:
Dartmouth College, Hanover
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Summary

Tropes of Indigeneity both conceal and expose the tangle of land, labor, and race in the American southern context. This introduction poses Indian Removal as the underacknowledged historical thunderclap, akin to the Civil War, after which the South struggled permanently to regenerate its self-conception. In the narratives of modern and contemporary white southerners, the story of the southeastern Indian is inextricable from the white South’s story about itself - a structure built on preoccupations with loss, dispossession, sovereignty, and community. The Indian motif marks the passage from the white southern specular self to its socially constituted version, and the maintenance of that self is, in many ways, dependent on the internalization of an elaborate Indigenous fiction. What that narrative both covers over and exposes is haunting in more ways than we have realized: it is, finally, a revelatory model of not just settler colonial extermination but of the vacancies, desires, and horrors of a modernity constructed on the twin phantoms of materialism and racialism.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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  • Introduction
  • Melanie Benson Taylor
  • Book: The Indian in American Southern Literature
  • Online publication: 30 June 2020
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108861892.001
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  • Introduction
  • Melanie Benson Taylor
  • Book: The Indian in American Southern Literature
  • Online publication: 30 June 2020
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108861892.001
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Introduction
  • Melanie Benson Taylor
  • Book: The Indian in American Southern Literature
  • Online publication: 30 June 2020
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108861892.001
Available formats
×