Chapter 17 - Locating Race

Summary

In American Indian terms, “survival” (or the more frequently cited Derridean term “survivance,” commandeered by Anishinaabe writer and critic Gerald Vizenor to denote active tribal presencing) implies a willed immunity to the geographical, political, and economic coordinates that define the settler state and overwrite tribal precedence. Such invocations of sovereignty function mainly as intellectual or artistic aspirations rather than lived conditions. The bracing distinctiveness of the South is its magnification of racial separatism and intersectionality all at once – a clash that further highlights the anomalous position of the Indian, banished strategically from an intimate biracial order, and yet locked permanently and in fact produced within those genealogies. Put another way, the primal site of the US plantation, and with it the birth of racial capitalism in the American context, fundamentally relies on the irrelevance and erasure of Indians – and yet it continues to implicate, resurrect, indict, and appropriate their substance at nearly every turn, making them an indelible (if functionally illegible) component of a racialized economy. As a result, “Indians” are simply everywhere and nowhere in the southern narrative.