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Distributed for Dartmouth College Press

Native Land Talk

Indigenous and Arrivant Rights Theories

Distributed for Dartmouth College Press

Native Land Talk

Indigenous and Arrivant Rights Theories

Histories of rights have too often marginalized Native Americans and African Americans. Addressing this lacuna, Native Land Talk expands our understanding of freedom by examining rights theories that Indigenous and African-descended peoples articulated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As settlers began to distrust the entitlements that the English used to justify their rule, the colonized and the enslaved formulated coherent logics of freedom and belonging. By anchoring rights in nativity, they countered settlers’ attempts to dispossess and disenfranchise them. Drawing on a plethora of texts, including petitions, letters, newspapers, and official records, Yael Ben-zvi analyzes nativity’s unsettling potentials and its discursive and geopolitical implications. She shows how rights were constructed in relation to American, African, and English spaces, and explains the obstacles to historic solidarity between Native American and African American struggles.

296 pages | 6 1/4 x 9 1/4 | © 2018

Philosophy: Aesthetics


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Reviews

"In her close attention to individual voices preserved in little-discussed historical documents--(Ben-zvi's) careful analysis and naming of individuals who attempted to negotiate with or resist domination and violence--Ben-zvi makes a valuable contribution to scholarship on African and Indigenous American agency within the history of colonialism and to scholarship bringing forward specific African and Indigenous American voices that resisted Euro-American violence."

Janet Berry Hess | Transmotion

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments • Note on Terminology • Introduction • Equiano’s Nativity • Mohegan Native Rights • Spaces of Slavery and Freedom • Unsettling Birthrights • Ancestral Blood • Interlude: Blood and Graves • Ancestral Graves • Conclusion • Notes • Bibliography • Index

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