This chapter serves as one of two epilogues to this volume. In it, María Elena García focuses on three main themes: (1) the authors’ encounter with Indigenous Studies; (2) the importance of engaging with Native ideas of affect; and (3) the significance of thinking with haunting and ghosts as central to reimagining the history of science in the Americas. García explores the possibilities and limitations of placing Indigenous Studies next to decolonial scholarship and reflects on how or if this approach offers transformative frameworks for writing about and practising the “human sciences.” She also offers some thoughts about the place and significance of the more-than-human in this book, with a particular focus on ghosts, spirits, bones, and other entities that haunt the history of the human sciences. Finally, García takes inspiration from theorists engaging in multisensorial analysis to consider the “structures of feeling” that were both part of the extractive and colonial mode of the human sciences, and that might also emerge once we center Indigenous Studies values like radical relationality, reciprocity, and accountability in our writing, teaching, and mentorship.

The introductory chapter provides an overview of the book’s focus as a whole and explores its relation to existing historiography, including its engagement with decolonial and postcolonial theory and scholarship in Indigenous Studies and Latin American Studies. In highlighting the book’s unique arguments, contributions, and perspectives, the Introduction explains the concept and double meaning of "troubling encounters" and provides the book’s thematic organization. Noting that some chapters adopt a local perspective, others a national one, and yet others draw attention to transnational and even global domains, the Introduction reflects upon the variety of scales for interpreting and troubling the history of encounters in the human sciences. For the authors, the legacies of those scales are read in the myriad interactions of expedition science, in the relationality implied in fieldwork or the logic of settler colonial custodial institutions, and finally in the resulting theories about human nature and behavior that circulated globally within scientific circles and beyond.

The Preface outlines the origins, motivations, history, and stakes of the project that led to the publication of this book, and it discusses the project’s relationship to scholarship in Indigenous Studies and engagement of key works in that field. It explores what an approach informed by Indigenous Studies can bring to the history of the human sciences, and how it might build upon existing scholarship on this topic.

An introduction to the study of race in American literature.

Amidst the popularizations of eco-crisis in movie and television media in the past two decades, the internationally vaunted eco-fiction film “Don’t Look Up” (2021) stands as a recent, explicit near-term allegory for political-economic culpabilities, technocratic infatuations, and social-ecological consequences of anthropogenic climate change. How might this contemporary, culturally acclaimed allegory help to illuminate some of the textures of environmental violence as proposed by Marcantonio and Fuentes; and how might notions of climate coloniality challenge the allegorical presentation of climate crisis in Don’t Look Up? Drawing on ecocinemacriticism, literary ecocriticism, contemporary Indigenous studies, and social theory, this chapter assesses the presumptive Whiteness of vaunted mainstream ecocinema as a form of cultural narrative; the generally myopic coloniality of apocalypse narratives; and linkages to other forms of spectacle in an international polity dependent on neoliberal political economics and structures of extraction. If these dynamics are interwoven with legacies of colonialism and racism, what are the implications for media representations of environmental violence?

This chapter offers an overview of how indigenous Latin American ethics has centered on knowledge about the environment and earth. It proposes that although this is not a new conceptualization, it can be made more visible by examining the long process of imposition of colonial ethical values. With a focus on the centrality of the earth in indigenous ethics and education, this chapter discusses this process, from how early colonial texts like grammars and dictionaries aimed to replace indigenous ethics to bilingual language programs. In conclusion it suggests that indigenous educational practices have persisted through colonization and around the margins of top-down, state-mandated approaches, and are emerging in indigenous pedagogies that foreground the ethical dimensions of relationships with the earth.

This chapter provides a critical review of the latest debates within Indigenous gender studies that aim to advance understanding and awareness of gender relations and gender-based ideologies shaped in response to socioeconomic upheavals associated with patriarchal colonialism. Drawing from a spate of recent publications of gender-focused Indigenous studies, the discussion examines what theoretical and onto-epistemological insights are offered by Indigenous scholars involved in attempts to trace gender conflicts and tensions while identifying their implications for the contemporary constructions of gender, sex, indigeneity, and decolonization. Focusing on the studies of Indigenous gender formations with their nonbinary, ungendered, or genderless foundations in the circumpolar North and beyond, the author looks at how Indigenous gender studies continue questioning and challenging the deep-seated heteropatriarchal divisions, colonial heteronormativity, biological determinism, and neocolonial discourses on indigeneity.

This chapter looks at the work of the contemporary Noongar writer Kim Scott, focusing both on its portrayal of his family history and the history of Indigenous settler contact in Western Australia. It emphasizes the importance of the university as a context for Scott’s historical fiction, focusing on creative-writing programs and practice-led research. It demonstrates how the rise of “the doctoral novel” plays a vital role in a more plural and more just model of literary engagement.

This chapter considers Alexis Wright’s trajectory as a writer from Grog War (1997) to The Swan Book (2013), arguing that her body of work presents a consistent vision that is “at once Aboriginal and Australian, modern and ancient, local and yet outward-looking.” It pays special attention to the notion of “all times,” the relation between form and politics, and how imaginative sovereignty underpins Wright’s work.

“The Cambridge Companion to the Australian Novel provides a clear, lively, and accessible account of the novel in Australia. The chapters of this book survey significant issues and developments in the Australian novel, offer historical and conceptual frameworks, and demonstrate what reading an Australian novel looks like in practice.”

This chapter contests the prevailing interpretation of the post-Mabo turn as a decisive new era in Australian cultural history. While the Mabo High Court decision of 1992 was an important milestone in struggles for Indigenous land rights, the insistence on this date as a literary periodization neglects the continuities in settler culture that still structure settler fiction in Australia. Alternatively, recent First Nations fiction suggests possibilities within and outside dominant paradigms of legality.

First Nations Australian literature has often been the object of incomprehension and derogation by settler critics – something a deeper perspective of “presencing” can overcome. This chapter takes a decolonial perspective and highlights the self-assertion of First Nations writers against invidious characterization, such as that received by the poetic work of Oodgeroo Noonuccal in the 1960s. It demonstrates how nonIndigenous readers can approach texts by First Nations authors not as “tourists” but as “invited guests.”

This chapter explores the ways in which settler colonial racial capitalism designates Indigenous lands as nonsites of nuclear modernity, making them available for what Traci Brynne Voyles calls “wastelanding.” These are sites that are deemed unproductive, backward, and peripheral to the technological superiority of the global north but are nevertheless mined for “resources.” By homing in on the cycles of accumulation associated with uranium mining that largely occurs on Indigenous lands, I grapple with Marx’s theory of “so-called primitive accumulation” as a constitutive, contemporary, and violent extra-economic logic of settler colonial racial capitalism. Drawing on a range of theorists from classical Marxist to Critical Indigenous Studies tradition – including Peter Kropotkin, Rosa Luxemburg, Glen Coulthard, and Robert Nichols – I lead readers to the role of colonial dispossession in relation to the conceptual category of land in Capital, Vol. 1. Both building on and departing from recent revisionist accounts of primitive accumulation, I argue that Marx’s commentary on colonialism reveals the parasitic role of the state and how primitive accumulation functions as a race-making operation that is a necessary precondition for the present and future accumulation of capital.

British conquest narratives aim to normalize and justify British rule in the Caribbean by advancing a myth of rightful conquest and of Indigenous disappearance that operated both as colonial fantasies and engines of conquest. This essay tracks some of the narrative strategies British writers employed in their perpetuation of this myth, from textual appropriations of Spanish and French narratives to literary claims to indigeneity and belonging. Reading eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British conquest narratives alongside an earlier and transnational literary history of European writing about the Caribbean, I examine how Indigenous presence belies myths of disappearance and argue that colonists conflated indigeneity and race to further their claims to rightful possession.