POLI 287 - Outside-Elsewhere Decolonial Political Theories of Borders and Im/migration

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

By centering Critical Indigenous Theory and Native political thought on land, sovereignty, and reciprocity, this course explores how Indigenous ontologies impacts our scope of analysis of borders, citizenship, statehood, territory, governmentality, sovereignty, and im/migration. Through Joanne Barker’s Sovereignty Matters, Ofelia Rivas’s “Our Way of Life,” Mishuana Goeman’s “Land as Life,” Audra Simpson’s Mohawk Interruptus, Robyn Maynard’s “Black Life and Death Across the U.S.-Canada Border,” Harsha Walia’s Border Imperialism, and Shannon Speed’s Incarcerated Stories, the course reframes borders as not only racial and carceral regimes but also as settler colonial and imperial apparatuses.

Ultimately, the course makes legible Indigenous theories in Western dominated theories of borders and immigration as it imagines decolonial, anti-imperialist, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, non-Native praxis of accountability to and solidarity with Indigenous struggles for sovereignty in tandem with im/migrant justice. Raquel Madrigal.

Two 75-minute periods.

Course Format: CLS