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Anne Gregory, Reading Territory: Indigenous and Black Freedom, Removal, and the Nineteenth-Century State. By Kathryn Walkiewicz, Western Historical Quarterly, 2025;, whaf027, https://doi.org/10.1093/whq/whaf027
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In Reading Territory: Indigenous and Black Freedom, Removal, and the Nineteenth-Century State, Kathryn Walkiewicz revisits key sites in the discourse of U.S. expansionism. Concerned with the gender and racial logics undergirding White, male states and territories, she continually reasserts the project of Black-Indigenous belonging in Georgia, Florida, Kansas, Cuba, and Oklahoma.
In an incredibly useful book, Walkiewicz deftly works with rhetoric. She explores a rich source base of imaginative printscapes that both create and defy colonialism; and she interrogates nineteenth-century print culture in all its forms, including newspapers, plays, novels, surveys, maps, and signage on the land (p. 73). Because her investigation is grounded in the analytical frame of the state, her argument pushes against the myth of coherent White supremacy, revealing its violent, illogical core. Her needed discussion of current telescapes like Watchmen (2019) reveal continued erasures and cleavages between Black and Native communities.
Walkiewicz not only dissects explicit discourse about colonial and decolonial imaginations, but also mirrors the monster hunters of graphic novel Bitter Root (2018), bringing knowledges from Black and Native communities into conversation through slippages, gaps, and silences between worlds (p. 211). Throughout Reading Territory, Walkiewicz’s exploration of nineteenth-century discourse foregrounds exclusion. Her reading of silences reveals the lack of Cherokee voices in Georgia newspapers during Removal and the dearth of testimony from Seminole women living through Removal and war. In each gap, Walkiewicz brings silenced voices into conversation with both their contemporaries and the state.
