Towards a Decolonial Account of Desire: The Cultivation of Desire and Indigenous Women's Self-Making and Resistance in Early Modern French North America

This dissertation takes up desire as the central analytic to examine the founding and consolidating of settler-colonial rule in Northeastern Turtle Island (Québec and the Great Lakes area, territory claimed by the French Empire as Nouvelle-France) as well as Indigenous women’s self-making and resistance in that area. I explore how the cultivation of desire is simultaneously an intense site of political theorizing and colonial investment, as well as Indigenous women’s self-making and resistance. Centering embodiment and embodied practices, I show how colonists and Indigenous women crafted different forms of attachment and desire, as well as their respective political efficacy in early modern settler-colonial politics. If the settler-colonial cultivation of desire hinges on disciplining Indigenous women’s bodies and regulating their affect, how did Indigenous women react to, subvert, and resist such colonial interventions in and through their embodied practices? I examine these processes and practices by weaving together close textual analyses and archival-historical research. Chapters are organized thematically. Chapter 1 introduces desire as a central inquiry of political philosophy and theory. I articulate the overall theoretical problematic and my methodology. Chapter 2 is a close reading of Jean Racine’s Iphigénie to tease out what I call the “imperial fantasy of consent” manifested through the enslaved foreign woman’s attachment to her colonizer. Chapter 3 examines the settler-colonial cultivation of desire through an analysis of settler-colonial educational practices aimed at managing Indigenous children’s bodies and regulating their affect. In Chapters 4 and 5 I turn to Indigenous women’s embodied practices as ways of cultivating decolonial desire. Chapter 4 examines Indigenous women’s ascetic practices that I argue show a form of self-making and community-building. Chapter 5 examines Indigenous women’s agricultural labor, i.e., labor in land as decolonial praxis. A concluding chapter reflects on the theoretical and political efficacy of centering desire, attachment, and embodied relations to studies of subjectivity, power, and resistance, as well as to ongoing efforts in theorizing settler-colonialism as a distinct modality of power. Throughout the dissertation, I work toward a decolonial account of desire, which has two different valences. First, I develop a decolonial reading of desire—that is, I dissect how imperial ideology took shape in early modern French literary and cultural productions, as well as colonial discourses, through the articulation of desire. Second, I develop an alternative account of desire as concrete attachments and relations cultivated through embodied practices. This study therefore contributes to feminist political theory, history of political thought, settler-colonial and Indigenous studies, as well as studies of early modern France and the French Empire.

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