Andrea Smith, Conquest
2. Andrea Smith, Conquest: Sexual Violence and the American Indian Genocide.
This book is awesome. I've been seeing rave reviews for it ( oyceter's review; coffeeandink's review), and it absolutely lives up to its press.
First of all, I'm just desperately grateful to Smith for her language -- words, ideas, connections, concepts, frameworks. To be able to say why new-age religious appropriative crap is so harmful, or to put into words what feels so desperately cure-nearly-as-bad-as-the-ill about the domestic violence shelter model, or her neat expression of my frustration with the professionalization of everything I feel grassroots passion about... There is such exhilaration in finally having conceptual language for these things.[1] (Next task: learn to use that language.)
Plus the clear-voicedness that Smith puts into this book! (Which is much of what I loved about A Broken Flute, too.) I sometimes feel so frickin' immersed in the mainstream POV about the genocide of American Indians (Very Long Time Ago and Pretty Much Inevitable and anyway Everyone Meant Well And Did Their Very Best), that it's always such a relief to see someone writing about it without all the stupid minimizing lies.[2]
(And would I be too much of an academic geek to be thrilled that there are copious endnotes? Every couple sentences, another superscript? Because I am full of joy about that. This book is a reference, an ongoing tool against the skeptics, not "merely" a set of thrilling conceptual frameworks. Ee!)
The penultimate chapter, "Anticolonial Responses to Gender Violence," is absolutely essential reading for everyone in the women's anti-violence movement (and is likely pretty darn useful in the anti-prison movement, and other anti-violence movements -- I only called out women's anti-violence by name because that's where my activist roots are, and thus I can see how neatly this chapter deals with the broken places). Smith meticulously documents the failures of both mainstream and alternative anti-violence models, and instead of viewing those failures as those unfortunate edge cases that you'll always have, she moves them to the center of her analysis: if your anti-violence model doesn't work for women of color, for poor women, for LGBTQI women, for disabled women, for mothers of disabled children, for undocumented immigrants, she asserts, then your model breaks in important -- not marginal! -- ways. Additionally, models that work well for the women who Smith centralizes, tend to simply work well. That is, even women who can afford to walk away from their communities benefit from not having to. And so forth. It's a sweet bit of work, that chapter. Seriously, go read it. Even if you don't want to deal with the itemization of ongoing genocide in the earlier chapters -- and I can see why you might not want to -- do read chapter 7.
---
[1] I am developing such a crush on Smith: when I read her "Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy" in The Color of Violence, it was the same thrill, except condensed into a single-glug espresso shot of eight pages. OMG-framework! I turned right back to the beginning and re-read the essay, then re-read it again. And then didn't go to bed that night because I was too! Excited! To sleep!
[2] Which, um, YMMV on that. Lots of terribly upsetting not-pretty things in this book. Just so's you know.
This book is awesome. I've been seeing rave reviews for it ( oyceter's review; coffeeandink's review), and it absolutely lives up to its press.
First of all, I'm just desperately grateful to Smith for her language -- words, ideas, connections, concepts, frameworks. To be able to say why new-age religious appropriative crap is so harmful, or to put into words what feels so desperately cure-nearly-as-bad-as-the-ill about the domestic violence shelter model, or her neat expression of my frustration with the professionalization of everything I feel grassroots passion about... There is such exhilaration in finally having conceptual language for these things.[1] (Next task: learn to use that language.)
Plus the clear-voicedness that Smith puts into this book! (Which is much of what I loved about A Broken Flute, too.) I sometimes feel so frickin' immersed in the mainstream POV about the genocide of American Indians (Very Long Time Ago and Pretty Much Inevitable and anyway Everyone Meant Well And Did Their Very Best), that it's always such a relief to see someone writing about it without all the stupid minimizing lies.[2]
(And would I be too much of an academic geek to be thrilled that there are copious endnotes? Every couple sentences, another superscript? Because I am full of joy about that. This book is a reference, an ongoing tool against the skeptics, not "merely" a set of thrilling conceptual frameworks. Ee!)
The penultimate chapter, "Anticolonial Responses to Gender Violence," is absolutely essential reading for everyone in the women's anti-violence movement (and is likely pretty darn useful in the anti-prison movement, and other anti-violence movements -- I only called out women's anti-violence by name because that's where my activist roots are, and thus I can see how neatly this chapter deals with the broken places). Smith meticulously documents the failures of both mainstream and alternative anti-violence models, and instead of viewing those failures as those unfortunate edge cases that you'll always have, she moves them to the center of her analysis: if your anti-violence model doesn't work for women of color, for poor women, for LGBTQI women, for disabled women, for mothers of disabled children, for undocumented immigrants, she asserts, then your model breaks in important -- not marginal! -- ways. Additionally, models that work well for the women who Smith centralizes, tend to simply work well. That is, even women who can afford to walk away from their communities benefit from not having to. And so forth. It's a sweet bit of work, that chapter. Seriously, go read it. Even if you don't want to deal with the itemization of ongoing genocide in the earlier chapters -- and I can see why you might not want to -- do read chapter 7.
---
[1] I am developing such a crush on Smith: when I read her "Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy" in The Color of Violence, it was the same thrill, except condensed into a single-glug espresso shot of eight pages. OMG-framework! I turned right back to the beginning and re-read the essay, then re-read it again. And then didn't go to bed that night because I was too! Excited! To sleep!
[2] Which, um, YMMV on that. Lots of terribly upsetting not-pretty things in this book. Just so's you know.