Vincent Marzano In The Erotics of Sovereignty, Mark Rifkin describes the disruptive and constructive potential of queer Native

writings. Analyzing the work of four Native poets and scholars based in the US, Rifkin thinks literature as the affirmation of what is not granted the status of an existent (of the real), but still lingers around unvoiced, in figural possibility. This comprehension of the function of writing, that he assimilates to Derridas hauntology, the intertwinement of past and future in a split absent present, points to new forms of personhood, peoplehood and sovereignty. To be exact, the aforementioned movement towards new definition of sovereignty first comes as a reaction by Natives to the constitution of a settlers jurisdiction, ruling their lands, their movements and their bodies. The colonial law imposed new relationships to the land (ownership, exploitation) which casted as irrelevant and perverse Native ways. Relegated to illegality, transformed under the new jurisdictions, Indigenous ways of relating to the land have been repressed. Commenting on the work of the Cherokee poet Driskill, Rifkin states that the repressed, erotic connection once held by the Cherokee to their land (before their deportation to Oklahoma), is still active within the Cherokee as a sort of partaken embodied memory. In a similar manner, the modes of being together which constituted the pre-settler way of life (and have since been erased by the derooting and the following importation of the nuclear family model) have not been fully erased. They lie as a potential within and between the bodies of contemporary Cherokees. Their potential is to be reactivated, through the re-appropriation of the lost language and the movements of the tongue it demanded. The body is thought as the memory-cell of their repressed culture, and intercorporeality as the locus of radical political transformation. It is by reclaiming these repressed modes of being together, these affective possibilities that find no recognition and no existence in settlers law, that indigenous subjects will affirm new forms of sovereignty. Forms that reach beyond a simple mirroring of settlers racism, as the actual blood quantum policy. This redefinition of sovereign indigeneity comes through reimagined practices of land occupation and love, erotics between land and humans. It opposes the imposed image of indianness crafted through the settlers fantasies. But it also refuses a simple reiteration of tradition through genealogy. As such, it faces the real challenge facing Native americans, the possibility of leading better lives without betraying their enfleshed past or simply embracing the settlers future. A question remains though, if the body serves as a memory of past affects, what is the matter of affective life? Can it be stored inside the flesh, as in the brain for neurobiologists? Are affects to be treated as information, to be used and re-used for projects at convenient moments? At times it feels like Rifkin could use more systematically his terminology, to separate affects from forms of feeling and erotic practices. If the latters are culturally constructed, can the same be said of the affective layer of existence? Do we ever chose not to suffer, not to enjoy? Can I be the sovereign over my affectivity? Or have i found a layer that systematically undermines the feeling of autonomy, of adequacy, of freedom? Id like to imagine that a renewed terminology would allow for a reunion between indigenous and nonindigenous people(s), affirming their erotic co-existence through new forms of feeling, taking from diverse traditions and leaving the mapping, enclosing, derealizing refuge of racist racial laws for good, through the pathos-together.