Unsettling America The Uses of Indianness in the 21st Century

C. Richard King offers a brilliant example of depth sociology, digging beneath surface realities of "Indian mascots and other cultural imagery to deeper white-racist oppression of indigenous Americans, past and present. Stealing lands and killing indigenous peoples has long been accompanied with fictional-Indian framing buttressing Euro-Americans' racial identity and historical rationalizations. King shows, well, how Native Americans' counter-framing and resistance projects assertively seek to reclaim indigenous images, cultures, and lands away from continuing white-racist oppression. -- Joe R. Feagin, Ella McFadden Professor, Texas A&M University, author of The White Racial Frame Once again C. Richard King has created a timely and urgently needed book. Unsettling America reflects on the persistence of re-presentations of American Indians in media and popular culture that must be brought in to the light and ultimately changed. This well-written and insightful book should be required reading in ethics, media and communication, and ethnic studies courses. -- Debra Merskin, University of Oregon In this volume C. Richard King offers an incisive analysis of contemporary struggles over "Indian" imagery, exploring examples that range from advertising to sports arenas to the battlefield, from place names to video games to comic books. This theoretically sophisticated yet accessible book explains why struggles over terms, such as "squaw" and depictions of "redskins," continue to matter in the 21st century. It is a timely and important contribution to the multidisciplinary literature on the cultural politics of Indianness. -- Pauline Turner Strong, University of Texas at Austin, associate professor, University of Texas at Austin, author of American Indians and the American Imaginary Unsettling America introduces readers to the myriad ways old traditions of Indian erasure and Indian stereotyping persist into the twenty-first century and manifest in new forms. As important, it highlights the sophisticated Native critiques and activist responses these colonial discourses provoke. -- Chadwick Allen, professor of English, coordinator for the American Indian Studies Program, Ohio State University