OA:W2139898052<\/a><\/p>\nAuthors:<\/h4>\n
Eric Cheyfitz<\/p>\n
Abstract:<\/h4>\n
The emergence of the idea of race as a scientific category in the first half of the nineteenth century in the United States was simultaneous with the emergence of biology as a category of knowledge and scientific racism as a mode of justifying both the enslavement of African Americans and the genocide of American Indians. (1) This racial bio-logic formed a new discourse of identity in the West, which claimed an autonomous and original realm of analysis for itself, though we can read it today as a particular form of cultural logic. This emergent bio-logic, however ambiguously, enters the discourse of federal law in the landmark case of U.S. v. Rogers in 1846. The Lumbee legal scholar David E. Wilkins gives us this summary of the facts of the case: [William S.] Rogers, a yeoman, got into a deadly scuffle in September 1844 with Jacob Nicholson, who, like Rogers, was Euro- American by race, had married into the Nation, and was, by law, a of their nation. Rogers killed Nicholson by stabbing him in the side with a five-dollar knife. Rogers was arrested, then indicted by the grand jury in the district court of Arkansas in April 1845. When was brought into federal court to hear the indictment, Rogers, representing himself, argued that the district court lacked jurisdiction to try him because both and the deceased were regarded legally as Indians by the and under the 1834 trade and intercourse act the United States lacked jurisdiction in such cases [of crime]. (39) The case came to the Supreme Court in 1846 on a certificate of division (45 U.S. at 567), the two circuit court judges not being able to decide the matter (ironically, as Wilkins points out, when the case did reach the Supreme Court, Rogers, unbeknownst to the Court, had died by drowning during a prison break [40]). Somewhat contrary to Wilkins’ summary, Rogers, in his plea, did not assert that he and the deceased were regarded legally as Indians by the Nation but that and Nicholson were Indians (45 U.S. at 568; my emphasis). This may seem to put too fine a point the matter but I think not. For what Rogers’ identification of himself as a Cherokee suggests is an important tension between the cultural-political identity: and what was at this moment emerging as the racial designation Indian. That is, the identity of Cherokee articulates a coupling of cultural logic with a bio-logic. A longer quote from Rogers’ plea can help us understand this coupling, which represents the historic shift in emphasis from to Indian, that is, from cultural logic to bio-logic: And the defendant further says, that, from the time removed, as aforesaid, incorporated himself with the said tribe of Indians as one of them, and was and is so treated, recognized, and adopted by said tribe and the proper authorities thereof, and exercised and exercises all the rights and of a in said tribe, and was and is domiciled in the country aforesaid; that, before ______ and at the time of the commission of the supposed crime, if any such was committed, to wit, in the country aforesaid, he, the defendant, by the acts aforesaid, became, and was, and still is, a of the and became, and was, and still is, a Indian, within the true intent and meaning of the act of Congress in that behalf provided. (568) The syntax of the plea suggests that to be a citizen of the nation, which is to exercise … all the rights and privileges thereof, is to be a Indian. On the one hand, we can say that thinking incorporates a biological term of race, Indian (coined by Columbus and acquiring its biological meaning in the nineteenth-century discourses of law and anthropology), into a cultural-political term, Cherokee, representing a particular post-invasion national formation that took shape in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in response to Anglo-American imperialism. \u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
DOI: OA:W2139898052 Authors: Eric Cheyfitz Abstract: The emergence of the idea of race as a scientific category in the first half of the nineteenth century in the United States was simultaneous with the emergence of biology as a category of knowledge and scientific racism as a mode of justifying both the enslavement of African Americans […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-363","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-its-e"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/citations.tools.bio-logic.fr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/363","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/citations.tools.bio-logic.fr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/citations.tools.bio-logic.fr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citations.tools.bio-logic.fr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citations.tools.bio-logic.fr\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=363"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/citations.tools.bio-logic.fr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/363\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/citations.tools.bio-logic.fr\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=363"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citations.tools.bio-logic.fr\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=363"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citations.tools.bio-logic.fr\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=363"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}