Methodological Considerations at the Intersection of Southern Studies and Indigenous Studies

Abstract:
This talk will explore the methodologies employed in Caison’s Red States: Indigeneity, Settler Colonialism, and Southern Studies (UGA Press 2018) and offer a retrospective of how the author’s work engages with Critical Indigenous Studies and Critical Regional Studies. Working from the premise that Indigenous studies offers epistemological frameworks for investigation rather than simply “objects” for study under traditional Western theories of knowledge, Caison will discuss the ethical considerations non-Native scholars must consider when engaging Indigenous knowledges. She also reflects on how Critical Indigenous Studies poses a challenge to both Western concepts of disciplinary specificity and calls for interdisciplinarity. She will close with remarks on how American studies might more productively engage questions of region when informed by work in Critical Indigenous Studies.

Bio:
Gina Caison is Associate Professor of English at Georgia State University where she teaches courses in southern literature, Native American literatures, and documentary practices. She is author of Red States: Indigeneity, Settler Colonialism, and Southern Studies (UGA Press 2018), which won the 2019 C. Hugh Holman Award for the best book in southern literary studies. Along with Lisa Hinrichsen and Stephanie Rountree, she is co-editor of Small-Screen Souths: Region, Identity, and the Cultural Politics of Television (LSU Press 2017) and the forthcoming Remediating Region: New Media and the U.S. South (LSU Press 2021). She currently serves as president of the Society for the Study of Southern Literature. During the 2020-21 academic year, she is a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Central European University in Budapest.

This guest lecture will take place on June 3rd, 10:30 am via MLUConf.
Everyone interested is welcome to attend. Please register with Laura-Isabella Heitz at laura-isabella.heitz@amerikanistik.uni-halle.de