The Parasitical Trick

Mediating Dispossession in Early America

Bibliographic Data

ID9596605
AuthorsEthan A Plaue (corresponding author)
Year2023
Volume95
Issue1
Pages89-113
Publication date2023-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueAmerican Literature (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0002-9831 • E-ISSN: 1527-2117
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/00029831-10345379
OpenAlexW4312007520
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited29

How do settlers organize their discursive relationship with the lands they settle, in order to claim, conceptually and materially, the position of owner and occupant? What must they do to transform themselves, in their eyes and in the eyes of others, from parasite to host? And in what ways have these practices been contested? This article addresses these questions in the historical context of early American settler colonialism and demonstrates the relational structure that colonial legitimation requires, including how this structure is mediated by subjects not strictly part of that relation. Through readings of John Marshall, Mary Rowlandson, James Printer, and Martin R. Delany, this article brings together the fields of media philosophy and settler colonial studies to theorize the “parasitical trick” as a fundamental and flexible technique of settler colonialism that removes Indigenous people from relationality by, paradoxically, making them central to it

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Colonialism · Context (archaeology) · Indigenous · Legitimation · Order (exchange) · Political science · Politics · Relation (database) · Sociology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · History · Indigenous Health, Education, and Rights · Indigenous Studies and Ecology · Law