Mark Rifkin
PhD
Interests
Indigenous studies; queer and trans studies; Native American literature; nineteenth-century US literary studies; speculative fiction; feminist, critical race, postcolonial, and political theory; histories of race and empire.
Education
- PhD, English, University of Pennsylvania, 2003
- BA, English and American Studies, Rutgers University, 1996
Books
- The Politics of Kinship: Race, Family, Governance. Duke University Press, 2024.
- Speaking for the People: Native Writing and the Question of Political Form. Duke University Press, 2021
- Fictions of Land and Flesh: Blackness, Indigeneity, Speculation, Duke University Press, 2019.
- Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination, Duke University Press, 2017.
- Settler Common Sense: Queerness and Everyday Colonialism in the American Renaissance, University of Minnesota Press, 2014.
- The Erotics of Sovereignty: Queer Native Writing in the Era of Self-Determination, University of Minnesota Press, 2012.
- When Did Indians Become Straight?: Kinship, The History of Sexuality, and Native Sovereignty, Oxford University Press, 2011.
- Manifesting America: The Imperial Construction of U.S. National Space, Oxford University Press, 2009.
Selected Publications
- Ed. Sexuality, Nationality, Indigeneity. special double-issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, co-edited with Daniel Heath Justice and Bethany Schneider, 16.1-2, 2010.
- “Reading for Political Form.” The Routledge Companion to Queer Literary Studies, ed. Melissa E. Sanchez (forthcoming 2024).
- “System-Building, Political Orders, and Indigenous Feminist Diplomacies.” Routledge Companion to Intersectionalities, eds. Jennifer Nash and Samantha Pinto. Routledge, 2023. 143-152.
- “The Form(s) of Allotment,” Routledge Handbook of North American Indigenous Modernisms, eds. Kirby Brown, Stephen Ross, Alana Sayers. Routledge, 2022.
- “Beyond Family: Kinship’s Past, Queer Worldmaking, and the Question of Governance.” Queer Kinship: Race, Sex, Belonging, Form, eds. Elizabeth Freeman and Tyler Bradway. Duke University Press, 2022. 138-158.
- “Reading in the Wrong Frame: Kent Monkman, Kara Walker, and the Possibilities of Disorientation,” Saturation: Race, Art, and the Circulation of Value, eds. C. Riley Snorton, Hentyle Yapp, Johanna Burton. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2020. 313-326.
- “Gendered Self-Determination: Native Intellectuals Theorizing Settlement, Sovereignty, and Forms of Indigenous Peoplehood.” Multiple Gender Cultures, Sociology and Plural Modernities: Re-reading Social Constructions of Gender across the Globe in a De-Colonial Perspective, eds. Heidemarie Winkel and Angelika Poferl. Routledge, 2020.
- “Intimacies of Place: Walt Whitman and the Politics of Settler Sensation,” The New Whitman Studies, ed. Matt Cohen. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020. 83-98.
- “The (Im)Possibilities of Indianness: George Copway and the Question of Representativity,” Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American Renaissance, ed. Christopher N. Phillips, 2018. 113-127.
- “Indigeneity, Apartheid, Palestine: On the Transit of Political Metaphors,” Cultural Critique 95, spring 2017: 25-70
- “Around 1978: Family, Culture, and Race in the Federal Production of Indianness,” Critically Sovereign: Indigenous Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies, ed. Joanne Barker. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. 169-206.
- “Indigenous is to Queer as…: Queer Cautions for Indigenous Studies,” Sources and Methods in Indigenous Studies, eds. Jean O’Brien and Chris Andersen, Routledge, 2017. 205-212.
- “Finding Voice in Changing Times: The Politics of Native Self-Representation through Removal and Allotment,” Routledge Companion to Native American Literature. Ed. Deborah Madsen. New York: Routledge, 2015. 146-156.
- “Queering Indigenous Pasts, or Temporalities of Tradition and Settlement,” Oxford Companion to Indigenous American Literature. Eds. Daniel Heath Justice and James Cox. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. 137-151.
- “Settler States of Feeling: National Belonging and the Erasure of Native American Presence,” Blackwell Companion to American Literary Studies, eds. Robert Levine and Caroline Levander. New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. 342-355.
- “Remapping the Family of Nations: The Geopolitics of Kinship in Hendrick Aupaumut’s ‘A Short Narration’,” Studies in American Indian Literature 22.4 (2010): 1-31.
- “Indigenizing Agamben: Rethinking Sovereignty in Light of the ‘Peculiar’ Status of Native Peoples,” Cultural Critique 72 (Fall 2009): 88-124.
- “‘For the wrongs of our poor bleeding country’: Sensation, Class, and Empire in Ridge’s Joaquín Murieta,” Arizona Quarterly 65.2 (2009): 27-56.
- “Debt and the Transnationalization of Hawai`i,” American Quarterly 60.1 (2008): 43-66.
- “‘A home made sacred by protecting laws’: Black Activist Homemaking and Geographies of Citizenship in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 18.2 (2007): 72-102.
Photo credit: Pierce McCleary