Theorizing Native Studies

"Theorizing Native Studies is a superb collection, an astutely conceived and targeted intervention in Native studies. The introduction is a gem and the essays cohere remarkably well around the core issue it raises: how to move beyond the unproductive opposition between European theory and Native practice, and to do so in ways that reflect and reproduce the particularities of Native epistemologies." - Patrick Wolfe, author of Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology

"With Theorizing Native Studies, Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith release Native studies from the old conventional dichotomies that organize prevailing conceptions of knowledge, such as theory/practice and subject/object. This collection gives us a taste of the disruptive force of a theory that begins and stays with the demand from the dismantling of State-Capital and everything that stems from it. A necessary weapon for a critical arsenal that faces the challenge of remaining relevant within and against the neoliberal university."
- Denise Ferreira da Silva, author of Toward a Global Idea of Race

“Theory might be read as ever-present according to this collection, but practice is clearly important too—Native practice in Native ways; Native activism, projects, scholarship. … In effect, the book allows theory and practice to lean against each other as steadfast partners in the Native matters that make Native studies important beyond the academy, double-underlining the Native-ness on which its chapters are grounded.” - Aroha Harris, Journal of Colonialism & Colonial History

"Given that academics continue to debate the efficacy of theory, Theorizing Native Studies supplies a necessary contribution to the field.... The editors have achieved their goal of compiling a collection that serves as an important contribution to theoretical studies in general, and Native Studies in particular." - Monica L. Butler, Journal of Anthropological Research

“Although each individual essay offers an important intervention on its own terms, as a collection, the volume is a vibrant snapshot of the field while also gesturing toward new horizons of theoretical possibility.” - Hokulani K. Aikau, Western Historical Quarterly

“The collected essays provide a helpful overview of the work of a new generation of activist Native academics and artists, many of them participants both in local community or transnational organizing and the Critical Ethnic Studies Association founded in 2011. … [A] groundbreaking contribution to the burgeoning writing in theorized politics and Native Studies activist scholarship that will have broad ramifications across many fields and movements for many years to come.” - Joe Parker, Women's Studies

"This book should be required reading for all students contemplating advanced scholarship in the field of Indigenous studies. It is a much needed corrective to decades of misplaced hostility directed towards theory in general, and Indigenous theory in particular. I recommend it highly." - Heather Devine, Canadian Journal of Native Studies

"[A]ll the essays gathered in this volume are of consistently outstanding quality."  - Deborah L. Madsen, Amerikastudien

"The collection assembles an excellent set of capacious (and differing) approaches to theory in native studies and will also prove helpful for those needing a brief survey of the theoretical state of the field in this moment." - James Gifford and Lindsay Parker, Year's Work in English Studies