Kopit- Mohawk Interruptus

Alison Kopit

In Mohawk Interruptus, Audra Simpson delves into the nuanced concepts of membership, identity formation, nationhood, layers of sovereignty, and citizenship through interviews, personal experiences, and legal documentation of the Mohawks of Kahnawà:ke. By positioning her study as an “ethnography that pivots upon refusal(s)” (106), she is able to convey the ways that hegemonic US citizenship and these “regimes of recognition” (20) can function as a form of colonial violence and structural forgetting. Thus, resistance to them through refusing recognition leads us to a place where advocating for “rights” is a lot more complex—and less wholly “good” than it is generally assumed to be.

I was most interested in how Simpson finds her own place in a politic of refusal. In choosing to explore refusal as a site of ethnographic richness and an expression of power—instead of as a consequence of participants being fed up by her pesky interviewes or an inconvenience to her research goals—she illuminates a landscape of resistance. She acknowledges both the larger and explicitly obstinate acts of refusal, such as when three Mohawks refused Canadian travel documents to travel internationally and were detained for weeks until their Iroquois Confederacy passports were accepted (18), alongside much smaller refusals. I was interested in the way that Simpson positions each act of refusal in the larger landscape, also giving great attention to the more subtle ways that refusal works in smaller interactions and interviews. For example, she listens for the cues when her interviewee asks her to turn off the tape recorder or shuts down conversation through claiming “’no one seems to know’” (111), and takes this as her cue to stop pushing for answers. Even in these moments, she positions the instance of refusal as a generative moment in her ethnographic research.

Throughout the book, she poses complex questions, many of which she does not seek to answer in full, but rather uses them to open space for dialogue and critical thinking instead of seeking to provide answers. I see this as a part of her methodology, and as echoing the resistance of her participants. In my own master’s thesis in Disability Studies, asking questions was a part of my methodology as well. At the end of each section and throughout my writing, I drew attention to the “representational conundrums,” as my advisor called them, through asking questions. Doing this drew attention to places where the work was not finished, and opened space for more conversation about the complexity of the art, instead of attempting definition and a conversation end. It was a way to push back against clinicians and therapists who claim to have "answers" about disability, and against critics and non-disabled audiences who saw disability art as simple, timeless, and apolitical. I posed questions to illuminate some of the complexity in the work, to point toward some of the problematic rhetorical issues in disability art, and to show places where critics depoliticized the work through their patronizing insistence on the normalization of disabled artists. Asking questions was a way that I found to push back against this perpetual normalization and patronization while leaving room for conversation, and it was interesting to me to see Simpson's similar pattern here.

Discussion Questions:

What is the role of the researcher in supporting refusal and resistance? How do we work this into our methodologies? Also, what are the ways that refusal manifests less consciously?