Manifesting America

The book explores the creation and extension of U.S. jurisdiction in the antebellum period, particularly over Native Americans and former Mexicans. It examines how U.S. law recodes the identities and territoriality of these populations and the self-depictions they offer in nonfictional texts. The government's narration of national space is haunted and disturbed by the persistence of the political geographies of peoples made domestic in the absorption of indigenousand Mexican lands. Exploring the confrontation between U.S. law and the self-representations of those once-alien peoples subjected to it, the book focuses on Indian removal in the southeast and western Great Lakes and the annexation of Texas and California. In foregrounding self-determination, acentral concept in current international debates over the rights of indigenous peoples, the project challenges the somewhat amorphous image of betweenness conveyed by such prominent critical formulations as "the borderlands," "the middle ground," and "the contact zone," examining a variety of writings (including memorials, autobiographies, and histories) produced by imperially displaced populations for the ways that they index specific forms of collectivity and placemaking disavowed by U.S.policy. More specifically, it shows how U.S. institutions legitimize conquest as consensual by creating forms of official recognition and speech for dominated groups that reinforce the obviousness of U.S. mappings and authority, and it demonstrates how forcibly internalized populations disjoint,refunction, and contest the roles created for them so as to create room in public discourse for critiquing U.S. efforts to displace their existing forms of land tenure and governance.

Manifesting America is an important innovative work that will provoke argument and inspire emulation. Each chapter is compelling and rich in its interweaving of textual readings, history, and theory., These steady-handed, often tough-minded readings document a genealogy of the interconnections between American Indian and Mexican-American experiences of American imperialism. Drawing on subaltern studies to great intellectual advantage, Mark Rifkin in Manifesting America innovates, re-imagines, and creates new pathways toward including indigeneity in American studies., Manifesting America skillfully reorients American studies from its current fascination with the transnational, spotlighting instead processes through which the U.S. incorporated Indigenous and Mexican peoples and their lands into its national imaginary. Rifkin's attention to this discursive naturalization of U.S. authority as non-coercive reinvigorates the critique of empire-building at home., Rifkin's study offers a critical genealogy of the dialectic of incorporation and acquiescence that persists as a central element of U.S. imperial nationalism. This path-breaking study will be widely read and discussed by scholars in American history, Native American studies, and American literary studies., Compels us to think carefully of the rhetorical and legal legerdemain of imperial conquest and the centrality of language in the making of the United States as a hegemonic power.

Mark Rifkin is Associate Professor of English at the North Carolina at Greensboro and the author of When Did Indians Become Straight?, and The Erotics of Sovereignty.