Speculative Relations

“Deftly navigating a staggering array of creative works, critical currents, and cultural contexts, Cherokee Nation scholar Joseph M. Pierce considers questions of relations, kinship, and how Indigenous artists and visionaries can help us realize life-giving worlds in the death throes of the current imperial order. With personal and poetic imaginings and incisive readings of Indigenous art and scholarship, Speculative Relations is a generative revelation and an urgent, provocative, and generous scholarly contribution. It exemplifies why Pierce is one of the most compelling and dexterous thinkers working at the intersection of Indigenous, queer, and cultural studies today.” - Daniel Heath Justice (Cherokee Nation), author of Why Indigenous Literatures Matter

“Joseph M. Pierce’s fierce, beautiful, embodied, and queer approach to Indigenous relationship and kinship is provocative and innovative. He makes a substantial contribution to queer Indigenous studies and to conversations about what Indigenous relationalities mean as alternative worldings. Speculative Relations will be essential for so many of us who are looking for the language, methodologies, and frameworks to do relational work in Indigenous studies.” - Jodi A. Byrd (Chickasaw Nation), author of Indigenomicon: American Indians, Video Games, and the Structures of Dispossession

"The book brings together personal narrative, poetic reflections, and analyses of Indigenous resistance and Indigenous affirmation in visual media and poetry, constellating these different forms of writing into a multifaceted and dynamic mapping of relational possibilities." - Jenna Hanchey, Ancillary Review of Books