Mohawk Interruptus - Ezra

   

In Mohawk Interruptus, Audra Simpson sets out to chart the ways in which the Mohawks of Kahnawake have refused forms of sociability and political recognition conferred by colonial states. Relatedly, Simpson maps out critical visions of membership, sovereignty and nationhood that resist the tendency of reducing Mohawk politics to a struggle over cultural representation. She explores how the latter emerge in contemporaneous tension with imperial modes of authorization resulting in a variety of legislative, ideological, and territorial confrontations (3).

Simpson claims that although a sovereignty can exist nested inside another, processes of mutual unsettling inevitably cast doubt on the legitimacy of both. This insight allows her to move beyond the logic of multicultural recognition or an analytics of minoritization to question the tenability of state projects and of what she calls a, "homogeonizing heterogeneity" (18). She argues that by exposing a history of contestation at the boundaries of the United States and Canada, Iroqouis people's resistance to dispossession calls into question the fundamental precarity of settler colonialism.

By interrogating power relations and opting not to describe native people through colonizing ways of knowing, Simpson formulates an 'ethnographic refusal' that takes into account the fundamental inequity involved in researching native lives and structures a line of inquiry that maintains a commitment to native community interests. This is essentially a refusal to ask certain questions in order to reorient priorities and trouble the subject/object economies of anthropological and political inquiry. Simpson ultimately describes this as a, "sovereign authority over the presentation of data" (105), or a sympathetic narration conscious of its agency and jurisdiction.

Her skepticism over the methodological norms of anthropology and political science also play a large role in the conceptualization of her project. She sees both as having produced inadequate and ahistorical renderings incapable of engaging fully with the apparent paradox of 'Kahnawake nationalism'. She attempts to repair this oversight by refocusing on a daily lived resistance to the ongoing violence of settler colonialsm.

Simpsons' interventions seem applicable to my research inasmuch as it deals explicitly  with the production of affective structures and how they come into conflict with the prescriptions of settler colonial states. Notions of ‘amor libre’ or ‘free love’ in the port cities of the southern cone emerged as historical refusals of state authority to compete with the horizontal structuring of nationally endorsed sexualities, constituting plural counter-cultural points of reference.

Questions:

Can ethnographic refusal be realized in relation to settler rather than native subjects? What types of reorientations does this imply?