Chapter 10 - Critique Is Not That Old, Composition Is Not That New: Sadakichi Hartmann’s Conversations with Walt Whitman

Summary

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.