The Horizon of Incrimination: Poverty, Liberalism, and Colonial Difference

Tuesday, February 26, 2013 from 2pm – 4 pm in Room 6107
This lecture examines the politics of colonial difference in the United States by focusing on two historically distinct episodes addressed to the divide between foreign and domestic in the constitution and contestation of US settler sovereignty.

Drawing on research from my recent book Poverty in Common, Goldstein begins with a discussion of efforts by the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) during the 1950s to oppose federal termination of US treaty responsibilities and to claim resources made available through President Harry Truman’s Point Four foreign technical assistance program.  The NCAI campaign highlighted parallels between territories on the margins of the US nation-state and impoverished nations abroad.  As part of this initiative, the NCAI organized a fourteen-member delegation to travel to Puerto Rico in March 1958 to learn about “Operation Bootstrap,” the island’s highly touted program for industrialization, and its recently established “free associated state” status.

Next, attending to historical continuities and differences with respect to the postwar era, I look at the twelve-day tour of the United States in 2012 by James Anaya, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, to collect information in order to
assess “how the standards of the Declaration [on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples] are reflected in United States law, policy and programs at both the state and federal levels, and to identify needed reforms as well as good practices.”  This lecture considers how indigenous
peoples have used the conventions of liberal internationalism and international law to hold the US accountable for its historical and present-day wrongdoing, while also asking what limits and occlusions might be perpetuated by reliance on liberal frameworks.

Brief bio:

Alyosha Goldstein is Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico. He is the author of Poverty in Common: The Politics of Community Action during the American Century (Duke University Press, 2012), coeditor of special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly on settler colonialism (2008), and the editor of Formations of United States Colonialism (under review at Duke University Press).