University Of Chicago Department Of Race, Diaspora, And Indigeneity Inaugural Colloquium: April 6, 2023 Mark Rifkin (University of North Carolina, Greensboro)

Mark Rifkin presents: “The Politics of Kinship: Race, Family, Governance”

Conceptions of “family” are crucial in the ongoing making of racial differences in the U.S. Discourses of the family (often under the sign of “kinship”), though, efface the existence of alternative modes of governance that do not fit the terms of the liberal state, representing those political forms, instead, as signs of racial deviancy — an inability properly to perform liberal privacy. Indigenous theorizations of political orders, though, open new possibilities for both tracking the work of such race-making and envisioning what other kinds of relations, networks, and formations (Indigenous and otherwise) might be seen as governance on lands claimed by the US.

Mark Rifkin is Linda Arnold Carlisle Distinguished Excellence Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Professor of English at UNC-Greensboro. He is the author of seven books, most recently Speaking for the People: Native Writing and the Question of Political Form, and the co-editor of the award-winning special issue “Sexuality, Nationality, Indigeneity.” He also has served as President of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association.