The University of Arizona Press
Date: Thursday, November 14, 2024
Time: 6:30 p.m., EST
Where: Amherst Books, 8 Main Street, Amherst, MA
Manuela Lavinas Picq will launch her book, Savages and Citizens, that she co-authored with Andrew Canessa. This celebration and book signing is free and open to the public at Amherst Books. There will be music, wine and cheese. Manuela Lavinas Picq is a senior lecturer in political science at Amherst College and a Latin American public intellectual whose work at the intersection of scholarship, journalism, and activism focuses on Indigenous politics.
About the book:
Delving into European political philosophy, comparative politics, and contemporary international law, the book shows how the concept of indigeneity has shaped the development of the modern state. The exclusion of Indigenous people was not a collateral byproduct; it was a political project in its own right. The book argues that indigeneity is a political identity relational to modern nation-states and that Indigenous politics, although marking the boundary of the state, are co-constitutive of colonial processes of state-making. In showing how indigeneity is central to how the international system of states operates, the book forefronts Indigenous peoples as political actors to reject essentializing views that reduce them to cultural “survivors” rooted in the past.
