Show Me the Bibliography: Indigeneity and the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

Show Me the Bibliography:Indigeneity and the Eighteenth Century Alice Te Punga Somerville (bio) What is Indigenous about the eighteenth century? What is Indigenous about this special issue? What is the difference between, on the one hand, studies of the eighteenth century that trace European imperial expansion and thus necessarily talk about Indigenous peoples and, on the other, whatever is happening in this collection—or indeed, whatever is happening specifically in these two longer essays by N. S. 'Ilaheva Tua'one and Julia Lum? If the mere presence of Indigenous peoples, knowledges, and worlds as objects of study or as topics of focus or as strands of interest was a satisfactory answer to these questions, it would be entirely plausible to argue that a great deal of existing scholarship about the eighteenth century could have been included in these pages, and that a special issue like this is surely redundant. An alternative answer could be that all of the people who have produced the scholarship are Indigenous—but that's not the case in this volume. Still another could be that the scholarship engages Indigenous language archives, or perhaps is written in Indigenous languages—but those aren't the cases here either. [End Page 255] Perhaps the answer is more about argument and method than about topic—that the scholarship in this special issue seeks to decenter Eurocentrism by centering Indigenous perspectives, although what such grand (and laudable) ambitions look like on the page, and in the review process, quickly becomes subjective and complex. How much less Cook does an essay need before it becomes Indigenous? Does it count if the focus is on how Cook and his peers and their crews engaged with Indigenous peoples, and if it does, how is that actually about Indigeneity and not just about non-Indigenous perspectives? How does one center "perspectives" of Indigenous peoples without resorting to stereotypes or generalization? And, for the purposes of this journal, how might one account for Eurocentrism (decentered or otherwise) or for Indigenous perspectives using the tools—and people—available through current academic conventions for ensuring and assuring rigor? A response I would proffer, which is less of a compromise and more of a stance than it might first appear, is: "all of these things and more." These questions—and my answer—may seem circular, but they sit at the heart of Indigenous literary studies and Indigenous Studies more broadly, and they provoke us to think carefully about the shapes and stakes of our research.1 None of the possible answers suggested in the previous paragraph is enough on its own, but together they weave something tangible. I use the metaphor of weaving here quite deliberately. This lineup of considerations is neither a bullet-point list of things for which keen (or cynical) scholars should aim, nor a tool for evaluating the degree—the quantum—of "Indigeneity" (or "engagement with Indigeneity") in scholarly work. Rather, it is the intersection and interlocking nature—the mutual reciprocity—of these answers that matters. In this issue, and particularly in the pair of longer essays, we find a constellation of researchers, approaches, topics, and archives. Placing pressure on any one essay to critically engage Indigeneity in the eighteenth century in its entirety would miss the point not only of a special issue but also of the broader calls for engagement with the longstanding critical work of Indigenous Studies scholarship. We might look, then, to the broader cloth in which these essays and this issue are woven: to bibliographies which direct us to broader conversations in which the researchers are enmeshed; to the positioning of authors in institutional and Indigenous contexts; to those gorgeous points where individual pieces here speak to each other in ways that stitch together communities, texts, questions, and archives that are usually separated by contemporary disciplinary configurations as well as by empire-based and state-based networks. We can hold this special issue that foregrounds Indigeneity alongside similar volumes in journals that have overlapping interests in the period or topic.2 We can consider the likelihood that each of these pieces will move around so many Indigenous kitchen tables, desks, and social media messaging platforms as Indigenous scholarly...