Unsettling America explores the uses of Indianness in the twenty-first century. It concerns itself with images of Native Americans and the ways in which American Indians have interpreted, challenged, and reworked them. Its close readings offer deeper understandings of racism, culture, and sovereignty.
C. Richard King is a professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender, and Race Studies at Washington State University. He is one of the leading scholars of contemporary American Indian Studies, and he also studies race and ethnicity more broadly. A past president of the Society for the Sociology of Sport, he serves on the editorial board for several journals, including Ethnicity and Race in a Changing World, Journal of Popular Culture, and Society of Sport Journal. King is the author/editor of a number of books, including Team Spirits: The Native American Mascot Controversy (2001, a CHOICE 2001 Outstanding Academic Title), Native Americans in Sports (2003), Animating Difference (Rowman & Littlefield 2010), and The Native American Mascot Controversy: A Handbook (Scarecrow 2010).
How Indianness Matters Now: An Introduction
I. Old Battles
1. George Bush May Not Like Black People, But No One Gives a Damn About
Indigenous Peoples: Visibility and Indianness after the Hurricanes
2. Embattled Images in the Marketplace: Commodity Racism, Media Literacy, and Struggles over Indianness
II. Ongoing Wars
3. On Being a Warrior: Race, Gender, and American Indian Imagery in Sport
4. Defending Civilization from the Hostiles: Notes on the Ward Churchill Affair
5. Always Enemy Combatants? The Killing of Osama bin Laden and the Native American Struggle for Humanity
III. New Fronts
6. Borrowing Power: Racial Metaphors and the Struggle Against American Indian Mascots
7. Alter/native Heroes: Native American Books, and the Struggle for Self-Definition
8. De/Scribing Squ*w: Indigenous Women and Imperial Idioms in the United States
Reclaiming Indianness: Notes Toward a Conclusions