Red States

Indigeneity, Settler Colonialism, and Southern Studies

Title Details

Pages: 298

Illustrations: 6 b&w images

Trim size: 6.000in x 9.000in

Formats

Hardcover

Pub Date: 10/01/2018

ISBN: 9-780-8203-5335-7

List Price: $57.95

eBook

Pub Date: 10/01/2018

ISBN: 9-780-8203-5334-0

List Price: $57.95

Paperback

Pub Date: 11/15/2020

ISBN: 9-780-8203-5879-6

List Price: $36.95

Red States

Indigeneity, Settler Colonialism, and Southern Studies

How the U.S. South has been shaped by Indigenous resistance to settler colonialism in literature

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Red States uses a regional focus in order to examine the tenets of white southern nativism and Indigenous resistance to colonialism in the U.S. South. Gina Caison argues that popular misconceptions of Native American identity in the U.S. South can be understood by tracing how non-Native audiences in the region came to imagine indigeneity through the presentation of specious histories presented in regional literary texts, and she examines how Indigenous people work against these narratives to maintain sovereign land claims in their home spaces through their own literary and cultural productions. As Caison demonstrates, these conversations in the U.S. South have consequences for how present-day conservative political discourses resonate across the United States.

Assembling a newly constituted archive that includes regional theatrical and musical performances, pre-Civil War literatures, and contemporary novels, Caison illuminates the U.S. South’s continued investment in settler colonialism and the continued Indigenous resistance to this paradigm. Ultimately, she concludes that the region is indeed made up of red states, but perhaps not in the way readers initially imagine.

Red States is a great book. Powerfully envisioned and just as powerfully realized, Gina Caison's work stands at the vanguard of a transformative new native southern studies.

—Eric Gary Anderson, coeditor of Undead Souths

Winner

C. Hugh Holman Award, Society for the Study of Southern Literature

About the Author/Editor

GINA CAISON is an assistant professor of English at Georgia State University. She is also the coeditor, with Lisa Hinrichsen and Stephanie Rountree, of Small-Screen Souths: Region, Identity, and the Cultural Politics of Television.