Table of Contents

Contents

Preface: Full Fathom Five

Introduction: Indigenous Critical Theory and the Diminishing Returns of Civilization
1. Is and Was: Poststructural Indians without Ancestry
2. “This Island’s Mine”: The Parallax Logics of Caliban’s Cacophony
3. The Masks of Conquest: Wilson Harris’s Jonestown and the Thresholds of Grievability
4. “Been to the Nation, Lord, but I Couldn’t Stay There”: Cherokee Freedmen, Internal Colonialism, and the Racialization of Citizenship
5. Satisfied with Stones: Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization and the Discourses of Resistance
6. Killing States: Removals, Other Americans, and the “Pale Promise of Democracy”
Conclusion: Zombie Imperialism

Acknowledgments
Notes
Index

About the Author

Jodi A. Byrd is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma and assistant professor of American Indian studies and English at the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign.

Reviews

"Theoretically rich, and broad in its intellectual scope, The Transit of Empire puts Indianness at the center of American histories that are not only national, but explicitly imperial and colonial. Jodi Byrd’s brilliant critique of contemporary multicultural liberalism places American Indian and Indigenous studies in close dialogue with postcolonial scholarship, transforming both in the process.  It is a work of power, complexity, and commitment, and should not be missed by anyone in these fields." —Philip Deloria

"The Transit of Empire is a sophisticated and groundbreaking work of indigenous critical theory in which Jodi Byrd reveals and explores the cacophonies of colonialism in literary, historical, and political settings." —Kevin Bruyneel, Babson College