The settler nation takes place: Katherine Szadziewicz Scharfenberg, Nations Taking Place: Unsettling Geographies in Indigenous and American Literatures, PhD dissertation, Northwestern University, 2024 | settler colonial studies blog

The settler nation takes place: Katherine Szadziewicz Scharfenberg, Nations Taking Place: Unsettling Geographies in Indigenous and American Literatures, PhD dissertation, Northwestern University, 2024

30Jul24

Abstract: “Nations Taking Place: Unsettling Geographies in Indigenous and American Literatures” considers the resistant, political, and affective power of geographic discourse in North America produced in the decades before and after the passage of the Indian Removal Act of 1830—that is, roughly between the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War (the late 1760s) and the decade preceding the Civil War (the mid 1850s). This study explores how geographic discourse simultaneously produced and unsettled social models for different kinds of communities. My analysis is particularly interested in how Native people used settler geographic discourses in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a way to resist colonialist violence and assert Native sovereignty. I also examine the central formal literary features—such as irony and narrative cohesion—that provide the mode of expression to demonstrate geographic discourse’s formally disruptive potential. The archive of “Nations Taking Place” includes treaty literature and other diplomatic writings, natural history, Native life-writing, and novels and poetry by Indigenous and settler writers including Hendrick Aupaumut (Mohican), Thomas Jefferson, William Apess (Pequot), John Rollin Ridge (Cherokee), Unca Eliza Winkfield (pseudonym), and Mary Jemison (adopted Seneca).

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