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Jens Temmen (Mainz):
"Overriding Native American Nationhood – Transnational
and Legal (Native) American Spaces (1788-present)" [title of thesis]
Abstract
The paper I would like to present will outline how the comparative analysis of the two narratives The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, The Celebrated California Bandit (1851) and Geronimo’s Story of His Life (1906) of my master’s thesis and its results translate into my PhD project. I will present the narratives’ strategic negotiation of U.S., Native, and Mexican nationhood through the disavowel or overriding of established legal or literary narratives of U.S. nationhood, which result in the production of a genealogically inherited and legitimized U.S. nation as well as a remapped, transnationalized U.S. Southwestern borderland. I will compare these findings with current undertakings to locate and analyze ambiguous manifestations of U.S. nationhood outside U.S. territory, such as Guantanamo Bay (Amy Kaplan, Nicole Waller), and link them to what Mark Rifkin describes as the „overriding sovereignty“ (90) that the United States displays in legal negotiations of the Native presence within its borders. My paper will sketch how my PhD project will attempt to locate the foundations for the current strategies of constructing U.S. nationhood outside its borders, within the legal and literary negotiation of the Native presence within its borders from the Early Republic until the present.
Rifkin, Mark. „Indigenizing Agamben—Rethinking Sovereignty in Light of the „Peculiar“ Status of Native Peoples.“ Cultural Critique 73 (2009): 88-124.
Rifkin, Mark. „Indigenizing Agamben—Rethinking Sovereignty in Light of the „Peculiar“ Status of Native Peoples.“ Cultural Critique 73 (2009): 88-124.
Bio
I studied American Studies, Political Science, and Modern and Medieval History at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. In 2012, I finished my Master’s degree (Magister Artium) in American Studies at JGU Mainz with the thesis „Displacing the Nation in the American Southwest--Joaquin Murieta and Geronimo’s Story of His Life.“ Since August 2012, I am a PhD student (supervisor: Prof. Dr. Nicole Waller, University of Würzburg) and lecturer at the American Studies division of Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz. My PhD project goes under the working title of „Overriding Native American Nationhood—Transnational and Legal (Native) American Spaces (1788‐present).“ My research interests include Native American Studies, Material Culture Studies, 9/11-literature, Postcolonialism, and Transnationalism.