Fall Graduate Scholars in Residence Talk:

Wayne Wapeemukwa: “Partisans of the Soil: Racial Capitalism and Métis Dispossession”

• Until very recently, almost all literature about Métis was written by outsiders who centered racial whiteness and presumed the rise of the Canadian state, church, and industry as inevitable. Against that tendency, I dually wield Métis philosophy, and a fresh interpretation of Marxism, to show how these missed opportunities narrowly reduce intersectional Métis identity during the "Scrip-Era" of settler-Métis relations (1870–1920). My study sits at a convergence of Métis ethnohistory, political philosophy, and Critical Race Theory, with an eye to how "half-breed scrip" mobilized colonially-modern discourses like scientific racism, Victorian patriarchy, and British civility in order to dispossess Métis and turn the plains into private property.

Laurie Dubois: “Powers of Fiction: Scholastic Novels and Forgotten Women in Third Republic France (1870–1914)”

• This project explores a large corpus of about twenty French scholastic novels never before studied from a literary perspective. The Scholastic novel is a primarily woman-led literary genre that appeared in the second half of the nineteenth century that has now fallen into disuse. These publications were innovative hybrid texts that combined recreational appeal and pedagogical function, weaving together narrative and didactic occurrences. This genre reached peak popularity during Third Republic and  focused on both transmitting knowledge and instilling values, aligned with the new national curriculum. Grounded in feminist theories, narratology, literary analysis, Laurie argues that the lessons disseminated by each book were in fact not all “aligned” and vary greatly depending on the author as they used fiction as a vehicle for political and ideological explorations.

Ismael Quiñones: “Undocumented Times: Rhetorics of a Colonial Moment”

• “Where are you from?” Whenever I speak, I get this question. The politics of our moment, with the escalation of human induced climate change, demand an answer for the cultivation of life. Aiming to reimagine political life beyond the delusions of modernity, this talk focuses on the problems facing the rhetorical possibilities for pluriversal futures. Colonialism, as a present structure rather than a past, is the political project for the exhaustion of life. By reflecting on my own story of migration, the histories of Spanish friars, and the traces of resistance in a colonial archive, Undocumented Times: Rhetorics of a Colonial Moment is a meditation on how to answer this question beyond the confines of intelligible politics.  

Christopher Thrasher: “As Fixed as the Mountains, and as Lasting as the Rivers”

• How did the Muscogee Confederacy’s responses to illegal expansion by Georgians in the 1780s more clearly define Muscogee sovereignty and reshape the U.S. politically? This question rests at the center of a chapter draft for a larger dissertation project. “As Fixed as the Mountains, and as Lasting as the Rivers” reviews Muscogee triumphs and tragedies in the 1780s, culminating in the spectacle and pageantry of a Muscogee delegation’s journey to New York City to make a treaty in 1790. The Treaty of New York brought the Muscogee Confederacy and the U.S. federal government into a mutually well-intentioned alliance against the ambitions of Georgia, albeit at a great cost to Muscogees and with limited success.