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.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies
Rafico Ruiz, "Slow Disturbance: Infrastructural Mediation on the Settler Colonial Resource Frontier" (Duke UP, 2021)
A Region of the Mind: U.S. Northern Plains and Canadian Prairies
Ian Macpherson McCulloch, "John Bradstreet's Raid 1758: A Riverine Operation in the French and Indian War" (U Oklahoma Press, 2022)
The Canada-US Border: A History of a Fluid and Unstable Boundary
The History and Ethnography of Indigenous Peoples in the Canadian Northwest
Michael S. Green, "Lincoln and Native Americans" (Southern Illinois UP, 2021)
Mohamed Adhikari, "Destroying to Replace: Settler Genocides of Indigenous Peoples" (Hackett, 2022)
David Crow, "The Pale-Faced Lie: A True Story" (Sandra Jonas Publishing, 2019)
Ana Sabau, "Riot and Rebellion in Mexico: The Making of a Race War Paradigm" (U Texas Press, 2022)
The Pavilion: When Canadians First Had to Confront the Country’s Genocidal Story
Carmen Martínez Novo, "Undoing Multiculturalism: Resource Extraction and Indigenous Rights in Ecuador" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2021)
Made of Corn: How Genetically Modified Corn Changed Science, Academia and Indigenous Rights in Mexico (Part 2 of 2)
Modifying Maize: How Genetically Modified Corn Changed Science, Academia and Indigenous Rights in Mexico (Part 1 of 2)
On "Black Elk Speaks"
Michael John Witgen, "Seeing Red: Indigenous Land, American Expansion, and the Political Economy of Plunder in North America" (UNC Press, 2021)
Michael K. Beauchamp, "Instruments of Empire: Colonial Elites and U.S. Governance in Early National Louisiana, 1803–1815" (LSU Press, 2021)
Margarita R. Ochoa and Sara V. Guengerich, "Cacicas: The Indigenous Women Leaders of Spanish America, 1492-1825" (U Oklahoma Press, 2021)
Tanya M. Peres and Aaron Deter-Wolf, "Baking, Bourbon, and Black Drink" (U Alabama Press, 2018)
Rain Prud'homme-Cranford and Darryl Barthé, "Louisiana Creole Peoplehood: Afro-Indigeneity and Community" (U Washington Press, 2022)
Kirstin L. Squint ed., "Conversations with LeAnne Howe" (UP of Mississippi, 2022)
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
New Books in Philosophy
New Books in Sociology
New Books in Psychoanalysis
New Books in Anthropology
New Books in African American Studies