from Part III - A Kosmos: The Critical Imagination
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 November 2019
Settler colonialism entails the absorption of Indigenous peoples and their territories by a state that assumes jurisdiction over them without their meaningful consent, and the United States, therefore, is a settler-state, one founded and maintained through processes of settler colonialism. How, then, do nonnatives experience their relation to the space(s) claimed by/as the settler state? In his running return to the question of how national identity relates to forms of quotidian sensory life, Walt Whitman offers what might be understood as a theorization of settler sensation. Even as he explicitly endorses expansionism, he explores how everyday nonnative perception confirms the givenness of settlement by taking it as the implicit frame through which the landscape, and one’s relation to it, gains meaning. In doing so, he implicitly explores how settlers efface ongoing histories of Indigenous collective placemaking and normalize processes of dispossession.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
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 Dropbox.
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.