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Contesting Liberalism, Refusing Death: A Biopolitical Critique Of Navajo History, Melanie Yazzie
Contesting Liberalism, Refusing Death: A Biopolitical Critique Of Navajo History, Melanie Yazzie
American Studies ETDs
This dissertation considers the pivotal role that liberalism, particularly as it is expressed and enforced through post-livestock reduction era logics of tribal economic development, plays in advancing a relentless and violent form of U.S. settler colonialism bent on the elimination of Navajo life. I use Michel Foucault’s framework of biopolitics as a theory of history to unlock, identify, and interpret what brought Navajo life into the realm of explicit calculation in Navajo political formations. I use the terms ‘experimental liberalism’ and ‘extractive liberalism’ to frame the two primary biopolitical formations I see at work in this period of Navajo history. …