New Books in Native American Studies
Society & Culture
Historians of the American South have come to consider the mechanization and consolidation of cotton farming—the “Southern enclosure movement”—to be a watershed event in the region’s history. In the decades after World War II, this transition pushed innumerable sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and smallholders off the land, redistributing territory and resources upward to a handful of large, mainly white operators. By disproportionately displacing Black farmers, enclosure also slowed the progress of the civil rights movement and limited its impact.
Dr. John Cable’s Southern Enclosure: Settler Colonialism and the Postwar Transformation of Mississippi (University Press of Kansas, 2023) is among the first studies to explore that process through the interpretive lens of settler colonialism. Focusing on east-central Mississippi, home of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, Dr. Cable situates enclosure in the long history of dispossession that began with Indian Removal. The book follows elite white landowners and Black and Choctaw farmers from World War II to 1960—the period when the old, labor-intensive farm structure collapsed. By acknowledging that this process occurred on taken land, Dr. Cable demonstrates that the records of agricultural agents, segregationist politicians, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) are traces of ongoing colonization.
The settler colonial framework, rarely associated with the postwar South, sheds important light on the shifting categories of race and class. It also prompts comparisons with other settler societies (states in southern and eastern Africa, for instance) whose timelines, racial regimes, and agrarian transitions were similar to those of the South. This postwar history of the South suggests ways in which the BIA’s termination policy dovetailed with Southern segregationism and, at the same time, points to some of the shortcomings of the burgeoning field of settler colonial studies.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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John G. Turner, "They Knew They Were Pilgrims: Plymouth Colony and the Contest for American Liberty" (Yale UP, 2020)
Tony Tekaroniake Evans, "Teaching Native Pride: Upward Bound and the Legacy of Isabel Bond" (Washington State UP, 2020)
Justin Gage, "We Do Not Want the Gates Closed Between Us: Native Networks and the Spread of the Ghost Dance" (U Oklahoma Press, 2020)
Liza Black, "Picturing Indians: Native Americans in Film, 1941-1960" (U Nebraska Press, 2020)
Audrey J. Horning, "Ireland in the Virginian Sea: Colonialism in the British Atlantic" (UNC Press, 2017)
Frederick Luis Aldama, "Graphic Indigeneity: Comics in the Americas and Australasia" (UP of Mississippi, 2020)
Julie Gibbings, "Our Time is Now: Race and Modernity in Postcolonial Guatemala" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
Agnès Delahaye, "Settling the Good Land: Governance and Promotion in John Winthrop’s New England" (Brill, 2020)
Jeffrey Alan Erbig Jr., "Where Caciques and Mapmakers Met: Border Making in 18th-Century South America" (UNC Press, 2020)
Charles F. Walker, "Witness to the Age of Revolution: The Odyssey of Juan Bautista Tupac Amaru" (Oxford UP, 2020)
Denise E. Bates, "Basket Diplomacy: Leadership, Alliance-Building, and Resilience among the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana, 1884-1984" (U Nebraska Press, 2020)
David Tavárez, "The Invisible War: Indigenous Devotions, Discipline, and Dissent in Colonial Mexico" (Stanford UP, 2011)
Andrew C. Isenberg, "The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750-1920" (Cambridge UP, 2000)
Laura Briggs, "Taking Children: A History of American Terror" (U California Press 2020)
Sarah Shulist, "Transforming Indigenity: Urbanization and Language Revitalization in the Brazilian Amazon" (U Toronto Press, 2018)
Maurice S. Crandall, "These People Have Always Been a Republic: Indigenous Electorates in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, 1598–1912" (UNC Press, 2019)
Jean Jackson, "Managing Multiculturalism: Indigeneity and the Struggle for Rights in Colombia" (Stanford UP, 2019)
Edward C. Valandra, "Colorizing Restorative Justice: Voicing Our Realities" (Living Justice Press, 2020)
Mark Santiago, "A Bad Peace and A Good War: Spain and the Mescalero Apache Uprising of 1795-1799" (U Oklahoma Press, 2018)
David R. B. Beck, "Unfair Labor?: American Indians and the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago" (U Nebraska Press, 2019)
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