Published In

The Global South

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

Fall 2020

Abstract

This article examines Pioneer Girl as a critical juxtaposition of the contradictions of settler imperialism. Settler imperialism denotes how the logic and operations of settler colonialism rationalize modes of conquest that are not reducible to the acquisition of territory but are central to the consolidation of settler state security and power. The novel’s use of Little House on the Prairie to explore the Lien family’s exile and displacement as a result of US imperial violence in Southeast Asia juxtaposes the histories of settler colonialism with imperialism, illuminating how the narratives that justify western expansion are not strictly territorial imperatives. The western frontier as the crucial space in which one “becomes American” relies on subduing nature, converting the hostile recalcitrance ascribed to “Indian Country” into a “Garden of the World.” In contrast, popular cultural references to Vietnam as “Indian Country” reiterate the demands of conversion and cultivation of docile liberal democratic subjects by destroying the Vietnamese landscape and robbing it of regenerative possibilities.

Attending to the different registers of cultivation central to the mythology of white homesteading in “Indian Country” illuminates settler imperialism’s structuring logic and its environmental impact. Cultivating the environment is not simply a description of agrarian enterprise or a function of western expansion. Rather, cultivation is a mode by which the violence of settler imperialism is rationalized and naturalized and heteropatriarchal settler subjectivity is inculcated.

Rights

Copyright © 2020 The University of Mississippi and Indiana University Press; received permission from Brian Carroll, IUP: “The Author may post a postprint using the JSTOR-created PDF (that is, the final published version of the article) on their personal website and/or one’s home IR eighteen (18) months after publication, or sooner as required by law. (We do not consider for profit repositories such as ResearchGate, Google Scholar, Academia.edu, and/or the Social Science Research Network as one’s in-home IR.) Additionally, the request for IR deposits must come from the Author.”

DOI

10.2979/globalsouth.14.2.03

Persistent Identifier

https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/36128

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