Wednesday, December 26, 2018

Pappas on Native American dispossession

Back in 2016, George D. Pappas (a practicing lawyer in North Carolina) published The Literary and Legal Genealogy of Native American Dispossession: The Marshall Trilogy Cases with Routledge. From the press: 
The Literary and Legal Genealogy of Native American Dispossession: The Marshall Trilogy Cases, 1st Edition (Paperback) book coverThe Literary and Legal Genealogy of Native American Dispossession offers a unique interpretation of how literary and public discourses influenced three U.S. Supreme Court Rulings written by Chief Justice John Marshall with respect to Native Americans. These cases, Johnson v. M’Intosh (1823), Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831) and Worcester v. Georgia (1832), collectively known as the Marshall Trilogy, have formed the legal basis for the dispossession of indigenous populations throughout the Commonwealth. The Trilogy cases are usually approached as ‘pure’ legal judgments. This book maintains, however, that it was the literary and public discourses from the early sixteenth through to the early nineteenth centuries that established a discursive tradition which, in part, transformed the American Indians from owners to ‘mere occupants’ of their land. Exploring the literary genesis of Marshall’s judgments, George Pappas draws on the work of Michel Foucault, Edward Said and Homi Bhabha, to analyse how these formative U.S. Supreme Court rulings blurred the distinction between literature and law.
Here is the Table of Contents:

Part I Theoretical Foundations & The Marshall Trilogy Cases 
Chapter 1. Theoretical Foundations 
Chapter 2. The Marshall Trilogy Cases: An Overview 
Chapter 3. Colonial Knowledge: A Unity of Discourses 

Part II Refining the Native American 
Chapter 4 Theory of Discourse in a Colonial Context: Edward Said and the American Eighteenth Century Literary Archive 
Chapter 5 The Discourse of the Vanishing Indian in Literature 
Chapter 6 Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans 
Chapter 7 The Wilderness in American Art and Literature 

Part III Resistance to Colonial Discourse 
Chapter 8. Law and Literature 
Chapter 9. Cherokee Resistance: Mimicry as Deception

Further information is available here.