Indigenous bodies, settler colonised and biomedicalised: Joanna Ziarkowska, Indigenous Bodies, Cells, and Genes: Biomedicalization and Embodied Resistance in Native American Literature, Routledge, 2020 | settler colonial studies blog

Indigenous bodies, settler colonised and biomedicalised: Joanna Ziarkowska, Indigenous Bodies, Cells, and Genes: Biomedicalization and Embodied Resistance in Native American Literature, Routledge, 2020

12Jun20

Description: This book explores Native American literary responses to biomedical discourses and biomedicalization processes as they circulate in social and cultural contexts.

Native American communities resist reductivism of biomedicine that excludes indigenous (and non-Western) epistemologies and instead draw attention to how illness, healing, treatment, and genetic research are socially constructed and dependent on inherently racialist thinking. This volume highlights how interventions into the hegemony of biomedicine are vigorously addressed in Native American literature. The chapters cover tuberculosis and diabetes epidemics, the emergence of Native American DNA, discoveries in biotechnology and the problematics of a biomedical model of psychiatry. They analyze work by writers including Louise Erdrich, Sherman Alexie and LeAnne Howe, Kim TallBear, Linda Hogan, Heid Erdrich, Elissa Washuta, and Frances Washburn.

The book will appeal to scholars of Native American and Indigenous Studies, as well as to others with an interest in literature and medicine.

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