Fictions of Land and Flesh: Blackness, Indigeneity, Speculation by Mark Rifkin

Abstract

Reviewed by: Fictions of Land and Flesh: Blackness, Indigeneity, Speculation by Mark Rifkin Ashley D. Clemons Mark Rifkin. Fictions of Land and Flesh: Blackness, Indigeneity, Speculation. Duke UP, 2019. vii + 323 pp. Social and political movements have increased the volume on voices often silenced and shed light on issues often overlooked. Amid the rise of these movements, some attempts to unify minority groups in the US have also emerged. In this context, Mark Rifkin’s Fictions of Land and Flesh: Blackness, Indigeneity, Speculation addresses the challenges of and successes with theorizing Indigenous and Black people’s difference and solidarity. Rifkin uses the Dakota Access Pipeline protests and the Black Lives Matter movement as entry points to discussing misconceptions of the shared struggle and subjection of marginalized groups in the US. Smartly, Rifkin identifies himself as both non-Native and non-Black before carefully endeavoring to think through relations between Native and Black groups. Although he acknowledges potential intersections, he focuses through the speculative on aspects that distinguish Black and Indigenous people. He argues that the speculative “as a mode opens intellectual, political, and ethical possibilities for thinking and valuing the differences among Black and Indigenous political imaginaries” (8). Rifkin lays out his theoretical framing by paying particular attention to conceptualizations of difference and unification regarding Black and Indigenous people. He warns against exceptionalism as well as situating and connecting variations of anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity within a singular power structure. Rifkin draws primarily from Black feminist thinkers such as Sylvia Wynter, Glen Coulthard, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Saidiya Hartman, and Patricia Hill Collins to understand the nuances of personhood, (de)humanization, sovereignty, nation, and territoriality. Additionally, he investigates dominance in terms of “enchattelment and settlement” (16) to critique those who would strategically view dominance as monolithic and demonstrates “varied formations of ‘we’-ness” (19). Furthermore, Rifkin exposes how the rationalization of singular structural oppression and shared struggle belies Black and Indigenous histories and trajectories. He suggests that seeing the groups and their backgrounds as nonidentical still risks hierarchical comparison. Specifically, when Rifkin frames territory, as it concerns authority and belonging, he enables a broader understanding, especially in discussing the settler-state. Territoriality’s place in this nation’s history of dominance and oppression also differentiates Native and Black people. To better illustrate his argument, Rifkin calls on Audre Lorde. Despite his lingering questions [End Page 792] regarding intersectionality’s effectiveness, he praises Lorde’s use of the theory, particularly in relation to difference and identity formation. He claims that considering difference as “a basis for relation, as opening the possibility for creative and sustaining engagement, involves tracking and contesting forms of misnaming and misuse that reify and distort distinctions in political formations and trajectories while still recognizing and reclaiming such distinctions as the medium through which to build connections” (31). Through this framing of difference, Rifkin shapes his analysis of Black and Indigenous relations beyond popular and dominant classifications. He accomplishes this through an Afrofuturist lens. In close readings of futurist narratives, he thinks through ways that anti-Black violence and struggles can translate into understandings of anti-Indigeneity. Through the term “settler” (54), he considers Black liberation in conversation with and apart from Indigenous sovereignty. Indigenous futurist and Afrofuturist texts and writers ground Rifkin’s analysis of identity strategies and narrative. By digging into the views of Black and Indigenous people in the future, Rifkin exposes patterns of white supremacy and oppression, which are distinctive yet familiar to both groups. He describes their struggles by using David Scott’s concept of problem-space and illustrates how Indigenous futurism and Afrofuturism imagine decolonization and freedom in the future. He mentions several texts as examples, including Grace L. Dillon’s Walking the Clouds. Most notable is his detailed reading of Octavia E. Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy and the fictional Oankali to address miscegenation, difference, and placemaking. Speculation has the potential to divulge both the real and the could-be-possible. It is in this area that Black-Indigenous relations can be addressed with little hierarchy and much revelation. Most poignantly, in chapter 3 Rifkin investigates carcerality. Walter Mosley’s Futureland: Nine Stories of an Imminent World (2001) and Daniel H. Wilson’s...