The Politics of Kinship

“The Politics of Kinship is a new and exciting contribution to the field that raises productive questions about the relationship and distinction between family and kinship. As part of his larger project, developing a queer critique of settler colonialism, Mark Rifkin here homes in on discourses of family and kinship to examine how these conversations have often elided underlying questions of governance and sovereignty.” - Manu Karuka, author of Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad

“Distinctly and importantly drawing on Indigenous intellectual frames in order to rethink racialization in the United States, Mark Rifkin makes a powerful contribution to the robust body of scholarship on family, kinship, and race. The Politics of Kinship is a fantastic book.” - Jennifer C. Nash, author of How We Write Now: Living with Black Feminist Theory

"The Politics of Kinship offers a powerful reading of how bourgeois categories have been used to oppress . . . Rifkin's recent examination will become essential reading within Indigenous Studies, while relating closely to feminist and queer scholarship on a vast, inclusive, and broader cultural history of the modern Americas." - Andrew Kettler, Journal of American Culture

"Rifkin’s book is helpful in rethinking the tensions between kinship’s potential to register forms of social life that refuse the grip of state ideology and its legacy as an instrumentalization by the state to regulate and perpetuate the White imperialist project of enfamilyment." - Silvia Schultermandl, Amerikastudien