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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Settler Social Order: The Violence Of Policing In New Mexico, Elisabeth R. Ehlert Perkal
Settler Social Order: The Violence Of Policing In New Mexico, Elisabeth R. Ehlert Perkal
American Studies ETDs
This thesis argues that in order to understand how and why police violence happens in the U.S., it is necessary to situate these interactions within a framework of settler colonialism. The police exist to maintain social order and, in the case of the U.S., this social order is defined by hegemonic structures of power including settler colonialism. Thus, the police fabricate and enforce settler social order that requires subjugating and eliminating Native people in order to preserve settler sovereignty. This thesis intervenes into monolithic critiques of policing in the U.S. and argues that critiques of police violence are most productive …
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. …