In “Writing as a Rupture,” Two-Spirit Oji-nêhiyaw writer, scholar, and visionary Joshua Whitehead meditates on the violent colonial impositions of the genre in publishing and literary studies, declaring that “the building of border and boundary around form and genre, the prescription of these enmeshments upon our stories and storytellers, is and was a means of entrapment and caging—I howl at the gate of these partisans.” Echoing Writing as Witness, Beth Brant’s foundational 1994 collection asserting the significance of queer and feminist Indigenous literature, Whitehead’s work contributes to a growing literary genealogy of Indigiqueer expression that insists on the embodied erotic as a constitutive politic for Two-Spirit literary sovereignty. This talk will consider the genealogy of rupture and witness and the generative urgency of contemporary Indigiqueer writing against the eliminatory imperatives of resurgent Christo-colonialism.

Contact Info: humcentr@fas.harvard.edu