Lindsey Smith

co-author and editor of Alternative Contact: Indigeneity, Globalism and American Studies

February 4, 2012

Lindsey Claire Smith is Assistant Professor of English, American Indian Studies, Oklahoma Studies, and American Studies at Oklahoma State University. She is the author of Indians, Environment, and Identity on the Borders of American Literature, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2008. She and her colleague Paul Lai recently co-edited a collection of essays with Johns Hopkins University Press entitled Alternative Contact: Indigeneity, Globalism, and American Studies, for which they won the American Studies Association's Constance M. Rourke Prize. Her current project is her second monograph, a study of Indigeneity and urban space.

Responding to the recent indigenous turn in American studies, the essays in this volume inform discussion about indigeneity, race, gender, modernity, nation, state power, and globalization in interdisciplinary and broadly comparative global ways.

Organized into three thematic sections – Spaces of the Pacific, "Unexpected Indigenous" Modernity, and Nation and Nation-State – Alternative Contact reveals how Native American studies and empowerment movements in the 1960s and 1970s decentered paradigms of Native American-European "first contact." Among other kinds of contact, the contributors also imagine alternative connections between indigenous and American studies

The subject of United States military and government hegemony has long overshadowed discussions of contact with peoples of other origins. The articles in this volume explore transnational and cross-ethnic exchanges among indigenous peoples of the Americas, including the Caribbean and Pacific Islands. Such moments of alternative contact complicate and enrich our understanding of the links between sovereignty, racial formation, and U.S. colonial and imperial projects. Ultimately, Alternative Contact theorizes a more dynamic indigeneity that articulates new or overlooked connections among peoples, histories, cultures, and critical discourses within a global context.

URL: https://library.okstate.edu/news/celebratingbooks/2012-honorees/lindsey-smith

Last Updated: 12 January 2022