Critical Indigenous Studies: Engagements in First World Locations

Critical Issues in Indigenous Studies

by Aileen Moreton-Robinson (Editor)

With increasing speed, the emerging discipline of critical Indigenous studies is expanding and demarcating its territory from Indigenous studies through the work of a new generation of Indigenous scholars. Critical Indigenous Studies makes an important contribution to this expansion, disrupting the certainty of disciplinary knowledge produced in the twentieth century, when studying Indigenous peoples was primarily the domain of non-Indigenous scholars.

Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s introductory essay provides a context for the emerging discipline. The volume is organized into three sections: the first includes essays that interrogate the embedded nature of Indigenous studies within academic institutions; the second explores the epistemology of the discipline; and the third section is devoted to understanding the locales of critical inquiry and practice.

Each essay places and contemplates critical Indigenous studies within the context of First World nations, which continue to occupy Indigenous lands in the twenty-first century. The contributors include Aboriginal, Metis, Maori, Kanaka Maoli, Filipino-Pohnpeian, and Native American scholars working and writing through a shared legacy born of British and later U.S. imperialism. In these countries, critical Indigenous studies is flourishing and transitioning into a discipline, a knowledge/power domain where distinct work is produced, taught, researched, and disseminated by Indigenous scholars.

Genres: Indigenous, Theory

216 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 20, 2016

About the author

Aileen Moreton-Robinson is professor of Indigenous studies at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, and is director of the National Indigenous Research and Knowledges Network. She is author of Talkin’ Up to the White Woman: Indigenous Women and Feminism and editor of several books, including Sovereign Subjects: Indigenous Sovereignty Matters.

Reviews

[Cian · Rating 4 out of 5]

More disciplinary focused than I usually go in for, but there are some gems here. 5 stars for Brendan Hokowhitu’s 'Monster: Post-Indigenous Studies' - which has continued to percolate in my head months since my first reading. Larissa Behrendt’s 'The Semantics of Genocide' was also a highlight.

[Janine Gertz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Intended for the academy, the combined authors make an argument for the field of critical Indigenous studies to be operationalised through the structure of a discipline where the production of knowledge occurs through the application of distinctive theories, concepts, terminologies and methodologies that in turn facilitate a framework for an Indigenous pedagogical practice.

[Lexi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Every second or third article was a flop. Tallbear's was particularly unbearable. An overall valuable text.