In the twentieth century, settler states have operated through science. At the same time, the field of American bioethics has safeguarded the moral authority of science. It has done so by upholding the settler logics of the sciences that it claimed to hold to account. This chapter explores how the imperial logic of American bioethics works – through its concepts, practices, and imperceptions. To do so, the chapter follows Carolyn Matthews, an everyday American with a rich “vernacular archive” and apt work experiences, across three medical sites and over three postwar decades. It tells Carolyn’s story in two registers – setting Carolyn’s work experience prior to 1974, when the US Congress passed laws for the treatment of human subjects, alongside Carolyn’s moral recounting of those work experiences in the late 1970s. Carolyn’s case offers insight into how the vocabulary and framework of modern American bioethics embeds a moral ontology organized around civic individualism and its safeguarding, as opposed to anticolonialism and its dismantling. The aim of this critique of bioethics through the Americas is to strengthen existing alliances for justice-based science and to inform anticolonial practices – in science, history, and transformative bioethics.

The Preface outlines the origins, motivations, history, and stakes of the project that led to the publication of this book, and it discusses the project’s relationship to scholarship in Indigenous Studies and engagement of key works in that field. It explores what an approach informed by Indigenous Studies can bring to the history of the human sciences, and how it might build upon existing scholarship on this topic.

This chapter seeks to trouble the understanding of how the category of the “human” is articulated in the theory and literature concerning race. It asks how one might view the category of the “human” differently when the focus is shifted from Blackness to Indigeneity. Departing from the premise that Black studies recurringly examines the question of which bodies are assigned a fully human status in a white-dominated society, the chapter posits that Indigenous studies and literatures interrogating the category of the “human” oftentimes ask a question that moves beyond dehumanization: namely, how the human is constructed or constituted in relation to other forms of life, other-than-human or more-than-human, including the land itself. Beyond literary articulation and theoretical interest, this question also has political import as it works to shift the parameters of what is thinkable as politics under the auspices of settler colonialism, as this chapter shows through the analysis of present-day Indigenous poetry by Deborah Miranda (Esselen/Chumash) and Natalie Diaz (Mojave).

The chronology in which a narrative concludes is itself an argument. Therefore, ending States-in-Waiting in 1966 – with the demise of the Nagaland Peace Mission, the dissolution of the World Peace Brigade, and the International Court of Justice’s refusal to make a judgment on the legitimacy of South African rule of South West Africa/Namibia – spells out a narrative of disillusionment: of disenchantment with the inability of the liberal internationalism of both the United Nations system of international order and of transnational civil society organizations to find peaceful solutions to decolonization that could effectively support national self-determination as a universal right.

The meteoric growth of the platform economy, its economic underpinnings as well as the accompanying human practices, have provoked academic debates as well as shone a light on its praxis. In this gig economy, the conditions of work have significantly changed from what used to be relatively stable markets, moored self- and work identities, with predictable technological cycles, established jobs in which individuals were ‘tied’ into roles and their organisations-of-employ, sufficient income during work and non-work periods, and with substantive protections through employment rights and social protection – also known as the standard employment relationship (SER). The gig economy has introduced efficiencies in engaging customer segments and supply chains, however its non-standard forms of employment (NSFE) which includes part-time, temporary, and zero-hour contracts and dependent self-employment, has brought with it: low pay, insufficient and variable hours, short-term contracts, and limited social protection rights (Rubery, Grimshaw, Keizer & Johnson, ). The majority of employees, migrants and foreigners, remain dependent on in-country structures to grant them SER rights – in many countries, though, they do not have the power to engage with those structures and no way to build on and improve their rights. The emerging story of the gig economy divides scholars, particularly in relation to the distribution of the economic and social benefits of this ‘new economy’, as well as international relations (IR) scholars in that race and indigeneity, and its intersections, have been missing in many of the debates. The challenge remains to upend the coloniality and neoliberal nature of work, and create a more democratic and inclusive labour market, in which more of the economic benefits are fairly distributed among those who participate in the gig economy and not just for indigenous citizens exclusively.

This chapter provides a critical review of the latest debates within Indigenous gender studies that aim to advance understanding and awareness of gender relations and gender-based ideologies shaped in response to socioeconomic upheavals associated with patriarchal colonialism. Drawing from a spate of recent publications of gender-focused Indigenous studies, the discussion examines what theoretical and onto-epistemological insights are offered by Indigenous scholars involved in attempts to trace gender conflicts and tensions while identifying their implications for the contemporary constructions of gender, sex, indigeneity, and decolonization. Focusing on the studies of Indigenous gender formations with their nonbinary, ungendered, or genderless foundations in the circumpolar North and beyond, the author looks at how Indigenous gender studies continue questioning and challenging the deep-seated heteropatriarchal divisions, colonial heteronormativity, biological determinism, and neocolonial discourses on indigeneity.

Inspired by recent work on global decadence as well as Susan Sontag’s classic formulation of dandyism, this chapter focuses on the figure of the dandy as he appears in fiction and nonfiction writing from and about the Hawaiian islands. In the hands of Anglo-American travel writers such as Charles Warren Stoddard and Robert Louis Stevenson, the island dandy often embodies an alluring but dangerous decadence associated in particular with late nineteenth-century Polynesia; for Indigenous writers and practitioners, by contrast, the dandy’s subversive, nonnormative masculinity becomes a way of leveraging European style against encroaching colonial power. This chapter argues that the island dandy thus emblematizes the manifold anxieties surrounding cultural and political modernity that would emerge in the 1890s and give the decade its characteristic sense of jubilant expectation and pessimistic dread. Within the broader context of the volume, the chapter also considers what approaches and methods might better serve the field of Victorian studies as it reorients itself along increasingly global lines.

This chapter traces the turn in diasporic thought, particularly in the settler nations of Australia, Canada, Aotearoa New Zealand, and the United States, toward engagement with the settler colonial histories of dispossession that were a condition of possibility for our arrivals here. It develops brief close readings of literary texts by Black, Asian diasporic, and Indigenous writers as a way to show how the entanglement of Indigenous and diasporic struggles for justice and transformation might be inhabited and mobilized. At stake, this chapter argues, is the possibility of imagining other worlds than the modernities that were born in the conjunction of Indigenous dispossession and racial slavery, worlds shaped by better, more sustaining (and sustainable) practices for relating with human and nonhuman others, including the land itself.

In this chapter, the authors explore the sociopolitical and cultural issues surrounding the uses of place names in society. Place names are social constructs that show people’s attachment to the land they live in; they help communities to navigate and orientate, pass down oral traditions, and demonstrate the changes to the landscape. Such functions of place names are more keenly felt by Indigenous communities, who share a close connection with place names, their lands, and cultural heritage. Given that toponyms have symbolic, cultural, and historical significance, they are unsurprisingly used by groups to assert control – be it a more powerful linguistic group subduing minority groups and their languages, or, in settler colonies, the colonial powers using place names to show power differentials between the coloniser and the colonised. However, natives also exercise agency, as they seek to rename and decolonise colonial names, although they are not always successful. This chapter relates to the cultural politics of naming, i.e., how people seek to control, negotiate, and contest the naming process as they engage in wider struggles for legitimacy and visibility. The chapter also deals with a gamma of different toponymic changes and with the notion of ‘toponymic nickname’, providing a comprehensive list of examples from around the world.

Of all the ways in which humans have chosen to divide themselves, none has a history as problematic as race. This concept has significant implications for almost every aspect of contemporary human conduct, irrespective of what ‘race’ we identify with, or even are deemed to belong to. This is particularly so in the field of education.

This chapter will look at the complicated history of race as well as some of the current challenges being faced. In order to describe the complex issues within this important area, a wide range of interrelated terms are used. Probably the most important of these terms is the underpinning notion of ‘othering’ ߝ that is, thinking about a certain person or group as not ‘one of us’... as ‘the other’. This important concept is also very relevant to discussions of gender and sexualities, so it is discussed further in Chapter 3.

This chapter explores what historical significance Manicheism has for the work of Frantz Fanon. It explores the role that St. Augustine’s anti-Manicheism might play in Fanon’s thinking, and the ways in which members of the Front de Libération Nationale in the Algerian war were deeply conscious of the historical terrain of Manicheism. This chapter argues that the quasi-Hegelian absolute negative is Fanon’s most powerful rebuke to both conventional Hegelian dialectic itself, and to the colonial manicheism that Fanon urges the colonized to overcome.

In “Nature and Race,” John Gamber examines the role that ideas of nature and the natural have played in the construction of race through legal, economic, and pseudo-scientific discourses, as well as the increasing prominence of Black, Latinx, and Asian American voices in contemporary ecocriticism and environmental writing. Gamber points out that “the construction of nature writing as a white genre relies on multiple erasures” and turns to the work of Priscilla Solis Ybarra, Carolyn Finney, Laura Pulido, Jeffrey Myers, Dorothy Fujita-Rony, and many others to construct alternative genealogies of ecocriticism and environmental literature that do not privilege white voices. The chapter ends by engaging emergent scholarship in oceanic studies to posit fluidity as a better metaphor for thinking about nature and human life.