Black liberation AND indigenous decolonisation: Manu Karuka, ‘Black and Native Visions of Self-Determination’, Critical Ethnic Studies, 3, 2, 2017, pp. 77-98 | settler colonial studies blog

Black liberation AND indigenous decolonisation: Manu Karuka, ‘Black and Native Visions of Self-Determination’, Critical Ethnic Studies, 3, 2, 2017, pp. 77-98

18Nov17

Abstract: This essay loiters among conversations on self-determination emerging out of Black radical and critical Indigenous intellectual and political traditions, conversations that raise fundamental questions about radical imaginations beyond the settler state, radical imaginations based on practices of survival grounded in relationship to place. My method is a contrapuntal genealogy of histories and ideas about self-determination driving toward Black liberation and Indigenous decolonization, which destabilize commonplace understandings of the form and function of the nation concept in North America. I focus here on self-determination, and not Black freedom, or Indigenous sovereignty, in order to contemplate the distinctions and interrelationships between Black and Indigenous internationalisms, proposals, and practices of territorial autonomy beyond the partitioning violence of the nation-state form that also challenge the limits of twentieth-century decolonization. The perspectives and demands of Black liberation and Indigenous decolonization potentially unravel U.S. claims to legitimacy and coherence. Self-determination, in the contemporary moment, has the potential to yield authority from governing states. In Black and Indigenous contexts, self-determination calls into question the nature of North American nations, decolonization, and relationship to place.

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