Daniel Heath Justice: Indigiqueer Imaginings at the End and Beginning of Worlds

In “Writing as a Rupture,” Two-Spirit Oji-nêhiyaw writer, scholar, and visionary Joshua Whitehead meditates on the violent colonial impositions of genre in publishing and literary studies, declaring that “the building of border and boundary around form and genre, the prescription of these enmeshments upon our stories and storytellers, is and was a means of entrapment and caging-I howl at the gate of these partisans.” Echoing Writing as Witness, Beth Brant’s foundational 1994 collection asserting the significance of queer and feminist Indigenous literature, Whitehead’s work contributes to a growing literary genealogy of Indigiqueer expression that insists on the embodied erotic as a constitutive politic for Two-Spirit literary sovereignty. This talk will consider that genealogy of rupture and witness and the generative urgency of contemporary Indigiqueer writing against the eliminatory imperatives of resurgent Christo-colonialism.
About the Speaker:
Daniel Heath Justice is a queer Colorado-born citizen of the Cherokee Nation/ᏣᎳᎩᎯ ᎠᏰᎵ, a Spears, Foreman, Riley, and Shields citizen descendant through his father and of mixed Euro-American settler heritage through his mother. He is Professor of Critical Indigenous Studies and English and a Distinguished University Scholar at the University of British Columbia, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (Academy of the Arts and Humanities), and an Officer of the Order of Canada. His most recent book is Allotment Stories: Indigenous Land Relations Under Settler Siege, an anthology on Indigenous responses to land privatization, co-edited with White Earth Ojibwa historian Jean M. O'Brien (University of Minnesota Press, 2022). Daniel comes to Massachusett territory to join the Harvard University Faculty of Arts and Department of English as a Harvard College Visiting Professor in Ethnicity, Indigeneity, and Migration during the 2023-2024 academic year.