Eric Cheyfitz
Biographic Data
| ID | 473792 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Eric Cheyfitz |
| GIVEN NAMES | Eric |
| FAMILY NAME | Cheyfitz |
| SIGNATURE | CHEYFITZ E |
| AFFILIATIONS | Cornell University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2069-2679 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 65 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1981 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Responsibilities Into Rights
This article examines how settler colonialism translated Indigenous social systems—rooted in communal responsibilities and kinship with both humans and "more-than-human" beings—into Western structures of individual rights and state sovereignty. Eric Cheyfitz argues that, prior to colonization, Indigenous societies operated through principles of consensus, reciprocity, and responsibility, without the separation between society and state that defin…
Israel, Palestine, and the Poetics of Genocide Revisited
In “Israel, Palestine, and the Poetics of Genocide Updated,” Mark Levine and Eric Cheyfitz, taking into account the Post October 7th Israeli invasion of Gaza, revisit their 2017 essay “Israel, Palestine, and the Poetics of Genocide,” to focus on the question of the limits of the definition of genocide in the1948 Convention. While recognizing that Israel’s latest war on Gaza meets the definition of the 1948 Convention, dependent on scale and inten…
Cidadãos excepcionais
Este ensaio aborda o paralelo histórico entre o genocídio dos indígenas norte-americanos, que caracterizaram a expansão para o Oeste na formação da nação estadunindense, e o genocídio do povo palestino, sob a política expansionista e militarista do Estado de Israel. O autor sublinha o paralelo entre as narrativas religiosas excepcionalistas (do “povo escolhido”) que servem de suporte ideológico para legitimar o processo violento pelo qual se esta…
Exceptional Citizens
This article by Eric Cheyfitz explores the religious and ideological foundations of land dispossession in both the United States and Israel/Palestine, drawing compelling parallels between the historical and ongoing displacement of Indigenous peoples and Palestinians. It critically examines how exceptionalist narratives—rooted in Puritan religious ideology and Zionist theology—serve to obscure and justify settler-colonial violence and systemic lan…
The Disinformation Age
The Disinformation Age, beginning in the present and going back to the American colonial period, constructs an original historical explanation for the current political crisis and the reasons the two major political parties cannot address it effectively. Commentators inside and outside academia have described this crisis with various terms — income inequality, the disappearance of the middle-class, the collapse of the two-party system, and the em…
Disinformation
This essay analyzes the current historical moment in the United States, where, it argues, ideology has been displaced in the public sphere by what the essay defines as Disinformation. The term itself is Russian in origin, coined in 1949. While the essay retains disinformation’s original sense of misleading information, it redefines Disinformation as a reflexive phenomenon rather than a conscious plan of propaganda, in order to analyze what I unde…
Response to Steven Salaita's “Inter/Nationalism from the Holy Land to the New World
NAIS 1:2 FALL 2014 Response to Steven Salaita 145 ERIC CHEYFITZ Response to Steven Salaita’s “Inter/Nationalism from the Holy Land to the New World: Encountering Palestine in American Indian Studies” STEVEN SALAITA’S ESSAY and mine, “The Force of Exceptionalist Narratives in the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict,” certainly intersect, particularly in how we read the way that American and Israeli exceptionalisms buttress each other: how the Puritan “er…
The Force of Exceptionalist Narratives in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
NAIS 1:2 FALL 2014 The Force of Exceptionalist Narratives 107 ERIC CHEYFITZ The Force of Exceptionalist Narratives in the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict There has been a turn, for many people, in recognizing that Manifest Destiny was a horror, and the supposed “exceptionalism” or “idealism” of American “foreign” policy—these first inhabitants from whom the land was stolen were long not treated as having American “rights,” as foreigners—will not sur…
What Is a Just Society? Native American Philosophies and the Limits of Capitalism's Imagination
This essay asks a question: what can't capitalism imagine in confronting the major social problem, poverty, facing the world today? The answer to that question is: the communal. To define the limits of capitalism's imagination, this essay begins by analyzing U.S. constitutional theory as represented in Federalist 10, where "the first object of government" is stated to be the "the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property…
The Corporate University, Academic Freedom, and American Exceptionalism
In the first part of this essay, I sketch some of the material conditions that comprise the contemporary corporate university: a job market dominated by contingent labor (non-tenure-track positions) and increasingly by part-time labor; the cooptation of links between scholarship and activism (particularly noticeable in ethnic studies and Native American studies programs) by the traditional scholarly agenda of "disinterested" individualized resear…
The (Post)Colonial Predicament of Native American Studies
For reasons having to do with both literary and political theory, post-colonial studies have largely ignored Native American issues in the United States, while at the same time Native American studies have remained ambivalent as to their potential position within a more inclusive, or aware, postcolonial studies. In this essay I argue that the indispensable and yet to date unexamined context for situating Native American literatures of the US with…
National Manhood
Book Review| March 01 2000 National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men By Dana D. Nelson. Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press. 1998. xiv, 344 pp.$49.95. Eric Cheyfitz Eric Cheyfitz Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2000) 72 (1): 221–222. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-72-1-221 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Revi…
The Navajo-Hopi Land Dispute
2000). The Navajo-Hopi Land Dispute: A Brief History. Interventions: Vol. 2, Righting Wrongs, Re-writing History, pp. 248-275
What Work is there for us to do? American Literary Studies or American Cultural Studies
In order to articulate a prospect for American literary study, which is the charge of this panel, one must first articulate a retrospect. My title for this talk, then, What Work Is There for Us To Do? is immediately subsumed under another title, What Work Have We Been Doing? where the we takes as its immediate referent professors of American literature, past and present. Any history that tries to answer this question will automatically be a conte…
The Poetics of Imperialism
By the Law of Nature
European Encounters with the New World
The Poetics of Imperialism
The poetics of imperialism
Matthiessen's American Renaissance
are the victims of our new canon-a brief series of literary works championed over and over in certain expected and unexciting ways. I have never been so aware how most of us, despite our differences, have become inmates of the same infernal cycle of taste; busily snapping at each other's skulls, we do not notice how we are all imprisoned from the waist down in the ice of our congealed enthusiasms. This ice, fixed at the temperature of absolute bo…
The Trans-Parent
The poetics of imperialism
The Navajo-Hopi Land Dispute
2000). The Navajo-Hopi Land Dispute: A Brief History. Interventions: Vol. 2, Righting Wrongs, Re-writing History, pp. 248-275
Matthiessen's American Renaissance
are the victims of our new canon-a brief series of literary works championed over and over in certain expected and unexciting ways. I have never been so aware how most of us, despite our differences, have become inmates of the same infernal cycle of taste; busily snapping at each other's skulls, we do not notice how we are all imprisoned from the waist down in the ice of our congealed enthusiasms. This ice, fixed at the temperature of absolute bo…
The (Post)Colonial Predicament of Native American Studies
For reasons having to do with both literary and political theory, post-colonial studies have largely ignored Native American issues in the United States, while at the same time Native American studies have remained ambivalent as to their potential position within a more inclusive, or aware, postcolonial studies. In this essay I argue that the indispensable and yet to date unexamined context for situating Native American literatures of the US with…
The Force of Exceptionalist Narratives in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
NAIS 1:2 FALL 2014 The Force of Exceptionalist Narratives 107 ERIC CHEYFITZ The Force of Exceptionalist Narratives in the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict There has been a turn, for many people, in recognizing that Manifest Destiny was a horror, and the supposed “exceptionalism” or “idealism” of American “foreign” policy—these first inhabitants from whom the land was stolen were long not treated as having American “rights,” as foreigners—will not sur…
European Encounters with the New World
Response to Steven Salaita's “Inter/Nationalism from the Holy Land to the New World
NAIS 1:2 FALL 2014 Response to Steven Salaita 145 ERIC CHEYFITZ Response to Steven Salaita’s “Inter/Nationalism from the Holy Land to the New World: Encountering Palestine in American Indian Studies” STEVEN SALAITA’S ESSAY and mine, “The Force of Exceptionalist Narratives in the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict,” certainly intersect, particularly in how we read the way that American and Israeli exceptionalisms buttress each other: how the Puritan “er…
The Corporate University, Academic Freedom, and American Exceptionalism
In the first part of this essay, I sketch some of the material conditions that comprise the contemporary corporate university: a job market dominated by contingent labor (non-tenure-track positions) and increasingly by part-time labor; the cooptation of links between scholarship and activism (particularly noticeable in ethnic studies and Native American studies programs) by the traditional scholarly agenda of "disinterested" individualized resear…
The Trans-Parent
Matthiessen's American Renaissance
are the victims of our new canon-a brief series of literary works championed over and over in certain expected and unexciting ways. I have never been so aware how most of us, despite our differences, have become inmates of the same infernal cycle of taste; busily snapping at each other's skulls, we do not notice how we are all imprisoned from the waist down in the ice of our congealed enthusiasms. This ice, fixed at the temperature of absolute bo…
The poetics of imperialism
The Poetics of Imperialism
By the Law of Nature
European Encounters with the New World
What Work is there for us to do? American Literary Studies or American Cultural Studies
In order to articulate a prospect for American literary study, which is the charge of this panel, one must first articulate a retrospect. My title for this talk, then, What Work Is There for Us To Do? is immediately subsumed under another title, What Work Have We Been Doing? where the we takes as its immediate referent professors of American literature, past and present. Any history that tries to answer this question will automatically be a conte…
The Poetics of Imperialism
National Manhood
Book Review| March 01 2000 National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men By Dana D. Nelson. Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press. 1998. xiv, 344 pp.$49.95. Eric Cheyfitz Eric Cheyfitz Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2000) 72 (1): 221–222. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-72-1-221 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Revi…
The Navajo-Hopi Land Dispute
2000). The Navajo-Hopi Land Dispute: A Brief History. Interventions: Vol. 2, Righting Wrongs, Re-writing History, pp. 248-275
The (Post)Colonial Predicament of Native American Studies
For reasons having to do with both literary and political theory, post-colonial studies have largely ignored Native American issues in the United States, while at the same time Native American studies have remained ambivalent as to their potential position within a more inclusive, or aware, postcolonial studies. In this essay I argue that the indispensable and yet to date unexamined context for situating Native American literatures of the US with…
The Corporate University, Academic Freedom, and American Exceptionalism
In the first part of this essay, I sketch some of the material conditions that comprise the contemporary corporate university: a job market dominated by contingent labor (non-tenure-track positions) and increasingly by part-time labor; the cooptation of links between scholarship and activism (particularly noticeable in ethnic studies and Native American studies programs) by the traditional scholarly agenda of "disinterested" individualized resear…
What Is a Just Society? Native American Philosophies and the Limits of Capitalism's Imagination
This essay asks a question: what can't capitalism imagine in confronting the major social problem, poverty, facing the world today? The answer to that question is: the communal. To define the limits of capitalism's imagination, this essay begins by analyzing U.S. constitutional theory as represented in Federalist 10, where "the first object of government" is stated to be the "the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property…
Disinformation
This essay analyzes the current historical moment in the United States, where, it argues, ideology has been displaced in the public sphere by what the essay defines as Disinformation. The term itself is Russian in origin, coined in 1949. While the essay retains disinformation’s original sense of misleading information, it redefines Disinformation as a reflexive phenomenon rather than a conscious plan of propaganda, in order to analyze what I unde…
Response to Steven Salaita's “Inter/Nationalism from the Holy Land to the New World
NAIS 1:2 FALL 2014 Response to Steven Salaita 145 ERIC CHEYFITZ Response to Steven Salaita’s “Inter/Nationalism from the Holy Land to the New World: Encountering Palestine in American Indian Studies” STEVEN SALAITA’S ESSAY and mine, “The Force of Exceptionalist Narratives in the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict,” certainly intersect, particularly in how we read the way that American and Israeli exceptionalisms buttress each other: how the Puritan “er…
The Force of Exceptionalist Narratives in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
NAIS 1:2 FALL 2014 The Force of Exceptionalist Narratives 107 ERIC CHEYFITZ The Force of Exceptionalist Narratives in the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict There has been a turn, for many people, in recognizing that Manifest Destiny was a horror, and the supposed “exceptionalism” or “idealism” of American “foreign” policy—these first inhabitants from whom the land was stolen were long not treated as having American “rights,” as foreigners—will not sur…
The Disinformation Age
The Disinformation Age, beginning in the present and going back to the American colonial period, constructs an original historical explanation for the current political crisis and the reasons the two major political parties cannot address it effectively. Commentators inside and outside academia have described this crisis with various terms — income inequality, the disappearance of the middle-class, the collapse of the two-party system, and the em…
Exceptional Citizens
This article by Eric Cheyfitz explores the religious and ideological foundations of land dispossession in both the United States and Israel/Palestine, drawing compelling parallels between the historical and ongoing displacement of Indigenous peoples and Palestinians. It critically examines how exceptionalist narratives—rooted in Puritan religious ideology and Zionist theology—serve to obscure and justify settler-colonial violence and systemic lan…
Cidadãos excepcionais
Este ensaio aborda o paralelo histórico entre o genocídio dos indígenas norte-americanos, que caracterizaram a expansão para o Oeste na formação da nação estadunindense, e o genocídio do povo palestino, sob a política expansionista e militarista do Estado de Israel. O autor sublinha o paralelo entre as narrativas religiosas excepcionalistas (do “povo escolhido”) que servem de suporte ideológico para legitimar o processo violento pelo qual se esta…
Responsibilities Into Rights
This article examines how settler colonialism translated Indigenous social systems—rooted in communal responsibilities and kinship with both humans and "more-than-human" beings—into Western structures of individual rights and state sovereignty. Eric Cheyfitz argues that, prior to colonization, Indigenous societies operated through principles of consensus, reciprocity, and responsibility, without the separation between society and state that defin…
Israel, Palestine, and the Poetics of Genocide Revisited
In “Israel, Palestine, and the Poetics of Genocide Updated,” Mark Levine and Eric Cheyfitz, taking into account the Post October 7th Israeli invasion of Gaza, revisit their 2017 essay “Israel, Palestine, and the Poetics of Genocide,” to focus on the question of the limits of the definition of genocide in the1948 Convention. While recognizing that Israel’s latest war on Gaza meets the definition of the 1948 Convention, dependent on scale and inten…
Political science (14 works) · Law (12 works) · History (11 works) · Art (10 works) · Sociology (9 works) · Literature (8 works) · Politics (7 works) · Philosophy (6 works) · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies (5 works) · Archaeology (4 works)