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The Spirit of the Law

其他書名	The Haunting of U.S. Federal Indian Law in the Contemporary Western
出版	ProQuest Information and Learning, 2017
URL	http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=oboDtAEACAAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api

註釋"The Spirit of the Law: The Haunting of U.S. Federal Indian Law in the Contemporary Western," examines the literary figure of the Native ghost, which I argue can enable both decolonial critique and epistemological reorientation within the fields of American and American Indian literatures. There is a critical tradition -- arising from Lucy Maddox's Removals and reaching fullest expression in Renee Bergland's The National Uncanny -- of reading Native ghosts as formative fantasies of the U.S. settler colonial imagination. In this interpretation, the figure projects a particular set of uniquely American cultural anxieties about property and conquest, and seeks to quell those anxieties with rehearsals of the disappearance of Native peoples. I, however, argue that this analysis fails to explain the ghost's role in contemporary texts -- particularly those by Native author -- because its logic assumes that when Native authors write literary ghosts, they are participating in the imaginative disappearance of Native peoples. "The Spirit of the Law" attempts to redress this critical aporia by reading four contemporary examples of the Native ghost together with formative cases in the body of federal Indian law in order to argue that the Native ghost indexes the possibilities of what Gerald Vizenor calls "survivance." I maintain that the nexus of law and literature is a crucial juncture for understanding the Native ghost, because in order to adequately interpret American Indian literatures (or American Indians in literature), one must work to understand the ongoing colonial legal situation to which they respond. As Philip P. Frickey has remarked, "it is plain to anyone who will look that federal Indian law is the law governing the colonization and displacement of the indigenous peoples of this continent by Europeans" (Frickey 1974). Frickey suggests this uncomfortable reality as one reason federal Indian law is understudied in legal scholarship: it is an indictment of the myth of American exceptionalism and a testament to the ongoing legacy of colonialism in the United States. The texts treated in my dissertation do indeed respond to particular historical and legal formations enacted by federal Indian law and often offer imaginative alternatives to their premises and conclusions. These responses and alternatives are imagined, in these texts, through the figure of the Native ghost. Reading this way, it is possible to emerge from the trap of overdeterminism in which the Native ghost signals the state of Native life as always already conquered and extinct -- a relic of the colonial imagination. Because federal Indian law is still good law, the responses to it imagined in these novels have ongoing resonance for debates about the status of Native land, sovereignty, and identity, to name a few of the legal issues on which my dissertation touches. As a result, the ghosts I describe resist rather than recapitulate the narratives of conquest and Manifest Destiny that have sequestered Native people in the U.S.'s mytho-historical frontier past.