Papers by Alyosha Goldstein
American Quarterly, 2026
On the possibilities of collective study and struggle in and beyond the present circumstances of ... more On the possibilities of collective study and struggle in and beyond the present circumstances of the university.
Studies in Political Economy / Recherches en économie politique , 2025
This contribution to the forum on Alberto Toscano’s Late Fascism argues for understanding the tar... more This contribution to the forum on Alberto Toscano’s Late Fascism argues for understanding the targeting of Indigenous peoples and land as a primary feature of settler fascist counter-sovereignty. The essay focuses on the authoritarian reaction of white settler possessive and exclusionary claims to belonging, anxieties over white “replacement,” and accelerating assaults on Indigenous sovereignty, land, and so-called natural resources as key elements of the long “counterrevolution of property” in the United States today.
Critical Times, 2024
Introduction to a forum on “Relations beyond Colonial Borders: Indigeneity, Racialization, Hospit... more Introduction to a forum on “Relations beyond Colonial Borders: Indigeneity, Racialization, Hospitality" in the journal Critical Times. The forum compiles selected contributions from a workshop convened for the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs at the Three Sisters Kitchen in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in April 2023. Natalia Brizuela, Samera Esmeir, Alyosha Goldstein, and Rebecca Schreiber brought together scholars, activists, poets, and artists whose work critically engages the modern border regime as a geopolitical technology indispensable to practices of colonial occupation and imperial management. The workshop focused on a number of key questions: How are we to think movement and inhabitation without reproducing the political and the legal frameworks that the modern border regime solidifies? Could it be that these irrepressible struggles, resistances, and worlds not only show the violence of borders but also illuminate what remains in their excess?
How do Indigenous relational practices unsettle or otherwise challenge colonial border
regimes? How does Indigeneity “travel” for those Indigenous peoples who have been displaced or who have chosen to live in places other than their historical homelands? How might the practices of people in the context of forced mobility, who aspire to cross a border to elsewhere or to return to their homes, be reflective of something other than the desire to settle in a land?
Critical Times, 2024
In the following interview, the O’odham scholar and activist Nellie Jo David situates the 2020 O’... more In the following interview, the O’odham scholar and activist Nellie Jo David situates the 2020 O’odham uprising against the construction of the Trump administration’s border wall within the longer history of O’odham resistance to colonization. David discusses the revolts of 1695 and 1751 as significant moments when O’odham peoples united to contest colonial rule, noting how this history of struggle is important for mobilization against the intensification of the US-Mexico border militarization, policing, and surveillance during the twenty-first century.
American Quarterly, 2023
Introduction to a forum on Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s book Abolition Geography with contributions by A... more Introduction to a forum on Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s book Abolition Geography with contributions by Alisa Bierria, Lisa Lowe, Sarah Haley, Robin D. G. Kelley, and Angela Y. Davis.
https://www.dukeupress.edu/biopolitics-geopolitics-life
The contributors to Biopolitics, Geopoli... more https://www.dukeupress.edu/biopolitics-geopolitics-life
The contributors to Biopolitics, Geopolitics, Life investigate biopolitics and geopolitics as two distinct yet entangled techniques of settler colonial states across the globe, from the Americas and Hawai‘i to Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand. Drawing on literary and cultural studies, social sciences, political theory, visual culture, and film studies, they show how biopolitics and geopolitics produce norms of social life and land use that delegitimize and target Indigenous bodies, lives, lands, and political formations. Among other topics, the contributors explore the representations of sexual violence against Native women in literature, Indigenous critiques of the carceral state in North America, Indigenous Elders’ refusal of dominant formulations of aging, the governance of Indigenous peoples in Guyana, the displacement of Guaraní in Brazil, and the 2016 formal acknowledgement of a government-to-government relationship between the US federal government and the Native Hawaiian community. Throughout, the contributors contend that Indigenous life and practices cannot be contained and defined by the racialization and dispossession of settler colonialism, thereby pointing to the transformative potential of an Indigenous-centered decolonization.
Contributors. René Dietrich, Jacqueline Fear-Segal, Mishuana Goeman, Alyosha Goldstein, Sandy Grande, Michael R. Griffiths, Shona N. Jackson, Kerstin Knopf, Sabine N. Meyer, Robert Nichols, Mark Rifkin, David Uahikeaikaleiʻohu Maile
This chapter focuses on how property relations, family, and prevailing conceptions of ownership a... more This chapter focuses on how property relations, family, and prevailing conceptions of ownership are key sites for the social reproduction of race, capitalism, and the particularities of U.S. settler colonialism. Two examples are analyzed to show how the racial, colonial, gendered, and generational making of property and the capacity for possession are both a consequence of particular historical conditions of dispossession and continue to be reproduced in new ways in the present. The first example is recent legal challenges to the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act in the historical context of the removal of Indigenous children by boarding schools, adoption, and foster care, and the broader custodial circuits of poor children of color. The second example is the ongoing fractionation of Native peoples’ land in the wake of the 1887 allotment act and the attrition of African American land ownership through the partition of tenancy-in-common of heirs’ property. Adoption, foster care, and the legal regimes of inheritance in this sense are quite literally a matter of social reproduction and a site of struggle over power and history in the context of the current moment.
The Funambulist , 2022
Under conditions of accelerating climate catastrophe and insatiable economies of dispossession, #... more Under conditions of accelerating climate catastrophe and insatiable economies of dispossession, #WaterBack is the indispensable counterpart to Indigenous demands for #LandBack. Foregrounding the interrelation of land, water, air, and Indigenous self-determination is crucial for the fight against the lethal consequences of colonial-capitalist extractivism. Along with its other environmental and community defense work, youth programs, ceremonial action, and solidarity initiatives, the Pueblo Action Alliance’s “Water Back” campaign is an indispensable counterpart to the now prominent Indigenous demand for Land Back. Both the campaign, launched in November 2020, and PAA’s “Water Back Manifesto” (https://www.puebloactionalliance.org/water-back) is a call for the rematriation of all water resources stolen under colonial-capitalist regimes and the resurgence of Indigenous self-determination, identity, and worldviews. From a Pueblo perspective, rematriation is reasserting balance with the natural world and centering the maternal relations of water, Indigenous matrilineal systems, and community defense. Water Back in practice is not limited to the legal arena of rights or the resolution of water litigation and adjudication, but has to do with the capacity to protect and practice Indigenous political, cultural, and spiritual reciprocity with water, land, and place.
Revised and expanded version introducing the edited volume For Antifascist Futures: Against the V... more Revised and expanded version introducing the edited volume For Antifascist Futures: Against the Violence of Imperial Crisis (Common Notions, 2022)
Critical Ethnic Studies, 2021
Authoritarian political leaders and violent racist nationalism are a resurgent feature of the pre... more Authoritarian political leaders and violent racist nationalism are a resurgent feature of the present historical conjuncture that will not be resolved by electoral politics or bipartisanship. Responding to the urgency of the current moment, this introduction to the "Fascisms" special issue of Critical Ethnic Studies explores what the analytic of fascism offers for understanding the twenty-first century authoritarian convergence by centering the material and speculative labor of antifascist, anti-imperialist, and antiracist social movements and coalitions. We emphasize fascism as a geopolitically diverse series of entanglements with (neo)liberalism, racial capitalism, imperialism, settler colonialism, militarism, carceralism, white supremacy, racist nationalism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, antisemitism, and heteropatriarchy. By emphasizing fascisms in the plural, we seek to address two problematics in particular. First, our intention is to highlight the global proliferation of fascist formations within and beyond the United States and Europe in an expanded historical context. Second, we aim to center the historical, political, and epistemological work of antifascist collective organizing undertaken by Black, Indigenous, and other racialized peoples across the planet.
Critical Ethnic Studies , 2021
This essay argues for an anti-imperialist internationalist project fully engaged in the specifici... more This essay argues for an anti-imperialist internationalist project fully engaged in the specificities of anticolonial and antiracist struggles as the necessary horizon for building movements against fascism and other variations of authoritarianism. During the 1920s and the 1930s, when what was named fascism first became a mass movement, a number of prominent anticolonial activists and scholars insisted that any condemnation of fascism that did not likewise denounce all forms of imperialism was both incomplete and inadequate. The constitutive link between imperialism and fascism remains crucial for parsing the historical continuities and disjunctures of the present moment. This essay sketches the relationship between anti-imperialism and antifascism as they have been articulated toward internationalist approaches to revolution, decolonization, and other global justice movements since World War I. The essay situates this history of anti-imperialism in relation to the liberation struggles of Indigenous peoples in what George Manuel called the “Fourth World" to argue that Native liberation is indispensable to collective struggle against and beyond the imperialist crisis of which fascism and its associated constellation of reactionary far-right movements are symptomatic and that neoliberal multiculturalism only further compounds.
![Research paper thumbnail of "Catastrophe, Care, and All That Remains" [uncorrected proofs] / by Joanne Barker, Jodi A. Byrd, Alyosha Goldstein, and Sandy Grande (with Julia Bernal, Reyes DeVore, Jennifer Marley, and Justine Teba)](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/77898962/thumbnails/1.jpg)
Social Text , 2021
During 2020, a menacing sense of doom and anxiety proliferated
by the Trump administration’s sho... more During 2020, a menacing sense of doom and anxiety proliferated
by the Trump administration’s shock-and-awe tactics compounded
the brutally uneven distribution of exposure, social atomization, precarity,
abandonment, and premature death under the COVID-19 pandemic.
The pandemic has had especially lethal consequences for those who are
impoverished, racially abjected, and deemed violable or disposable within
economies of dispossession. For Indigenous peoples under US occupation,
the mainstream news coverage of the pandemic’s death toll on the
Navajo Nation, on Standing Rock, and on other Indigenous nations came
and went with little sustained inquiry into the conditions of colonization,
critical for understanding the current moment. The obstinate negligence
of the CARES Act toward peoples and communities most impacted by
the pandemic is only one example of this intensified necropolitics. We
focus here on conceptions and mobilizations of care and uncaring, and
the catastrophe of the settler-capitalist state at this time. With all the
talk about the need for self-care and community care in this period of
concentrated epic crises, we ask: How does the discourse of care operate
within an imperial social formation? Is an otherwise possible? What are
our obligations in kinship and reciprocity? And how do we attend to these
obligations in times of imposed distance?
Feminist Formations, 2021
Rather than assume conformity to and compliance with heteropatriarchal norms to be the regulatory... more Rather than assume conformity to and compliance with heteropatriarchal norms to be the regulatory goal of contemporary social policy, I argue that the mandates and sanctions attached to programs such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) tacitly presume conformity and compliance to be ultimately unlikely if not impossible. This impossibility is accentuated by fiscal policies of devolution, state and municipal budget crises, and emergent economies of entrapment and extraction predicated on the desperation and vulnerability of poor people. Concurrently, state programs deploy normativity and normalization as a justification and a means to further brutalize—rather than to assimilate or economically reintegrate—those targeted by such policies. TANF policies are disciplinary not so much in the sense that they aim to teach and inculcate certain behavior; instead, they serve to ensnare and reproach recipients in the performance of uninhabitable standards and impracticable aspirations. In particular, the state-imposed heteropatriarchal sexuality administered by TANF endeavors to justify and accelerate the social disposability of poor women of color. In this context, the everyday practices and politics of pleasure theorized by women of color feminism and queer of color critique offer an especially indispensable resource for collective living otherwise.
Public Seminar, 2019
The graphic convergence of anti-Black and anti-Indigenous violence in the name of self-defense em... more The graphic convergence of anti-Black and anti-Indigenous violence in the name of self-defense emerges with unmistakable clarity in the recent the “stand your ground” meme featuring sixteen year-old Nick Sandmann wearing his “Make America Great Again” baseball hat. The red, white, and blue meme appeared on white nationalist and rightwing social media in the wake of the viral online video of the mostly white Covington Catholic High School students from Kentucky wearing MAGA hats and taunting Nathan Phillips, an elder of the Omaha Tribe, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC on January 18, 2019. The premise “land gets stolen” and the Sandmann “stand your ground” meme together starkly convey the relentless onslaught of racialized colonization, the fantasy of the perpetrators as the real victims, and the obstinate disavowal of the colonial present’s unpaid debts. Here the debt for what has been extracted through processes of colonization and ongoing economies of dispossession shows the inadequacy of current methods of accounting, compensation, and repayment. At the same time, to acknowledge that such debt is unpayable is not to forgo demands for restitution and economic redress. These are unpaid debts in the sense that they are an obligation to take responsibility for complicity in what has been done and to contribute to dismantling colonial and racialized relations of violence and possession. This article is part of a series of texts published on Public Seminar in the lead-up to the Digital/Debt/Empire symposium in Vancouver in late April 2019, convened by Benjamin Anderson, Enda Brophy and Max Haiven.
Social Text, 2018
This essay introduces and theorizes the central concerns of this special issue, “Economies of Dis... more This essay introduces and theorizes the central concerns of this special issue, “Economies of Dispossession: Indigeneity, Race, Capitalism.” Financialization, debt, and the accelerated concentration of wealth today work through social relations already configured and disposed by imperial conquest and racial capitalism. In the Americas broadly and the United States specifically, colonization and transatlantic slavery set in motion the dynamics and differential racialized valuations that continue to underwrite particular forms of subjection, property, commerce, and territoriality. The conception of economies of dispossession introduced in this essay draws attention to the overriding importance of rationalities of abstraction and commensurability for racial capitalism. The essay problematizes the ways in which dispossession is conventionally treated as a self-evident and circumscribed practice of unjust taking and subtractive action. Instead, working across the lethal confluences of imperial conquest and racial capitalist predation, this essay critically situates the logic of propriation that organizes and underwrites predatory value in the historical present. Against the commensurabilities and rationalities of debt and finance capitalism, conditioned through the proprietary logics of settler colonialism and racial capitalism, the essay gestures toward alternative frameworks for building collective capacities for what the authors describe as a grounded relationality.
Social Text, 2018
Agriculture as a relation to land based on domestication, possession, and commerce has long been ... more Agriculture as a relation to land based on domestication, possession, and commerce has long been a means and justification for colonization in what is now the United States. This is an agriculture in which the sociality of land is illegible and epistemologies of conquest appear to evacuate land of its unruly animacies. This essay focuses on class action lawsuits brought by African American and Native American farmers against the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) for discrimination in the administration of its farm loan programs. At stake is not only how forms of colonial governance, property, indebtedness, and jurisprudence continue to impinge upon and be contested or negotiated by Indigenous and Black peoples today but also how these shape political, economic, and social formations more broadly and variously manifest between past and present tense. It is precisely the coexistence and compatibility of necropolitical will and conciliatory inclusion that seem emblematic of the current conjuncture, where the sustained project of attrition, devaluation, and disposability under way enacts dispossessive projects in the historical present.
UCLA Law Review Discourse
Not-guilty verdicts, mistrials, and impunity for the Bundy family and many of their supporters in... more Not-guilty verdicts, mistrials, and impunity for the Bundy family and many of their supporters in the armed confrontations over public land use in Nevada and Oregon. Expanded access for private oil, gas, mining, and logging industries and the downsizing of national monuments such as Bears Ears lead by Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke. A number of highly contentious debates and sensationalized events have again focused attention on land held in the public domain by the United States. This essay argues that federal land policy as a form of colonial administration has been constitutive for the logic of expectation as property in what is now the United States. From the state land cessions negotiated on behalf of the Articles of Confederation to the preemption acts (1830–1841) to the homestead acts (1862–1916) to present-day demands for land transfer, the acquisition and disposal of the so-called public domain have been central to westward colonization, the consolidation of the nation-state, and the promise of land ownership as the ostensible foundation of individual liberty. These dynamics are evident in contemporary conflicts over public lands and arguments for the transfer of public lands to either state or private ownership. Approaching the Bundy occupations as flashpoints that illuminate competing interpretations and claims to land within the history of westward colonization, this essay seeks to demonstrate the ways in which expectation emerges from particular economies of dispossession of indigenous peoples that have historically worked through and across the division of public and private property.
Living Commons
A wide range of U.S. colonial strategies have deployed hunger as a weapon against Native peoples.... more A wide range of U.S. colonial strategies have deployed hunger as a weapon against Native peoples. Such practices have been so widespread as to defy summary. During the genocidal land-grabs called Indian removal or as a deliberate scorched-earth military tactic, the starvation of Native peoples has served as a frequent instrument in the service of U.S. colonization. Mass starvation has also often been a consequence of U.S. policies and programs or settler actions even when not explicitly articulated as an objective. Thinking with the video-performance work of the Mohawk/Blackfoot artist Merritt Johnson, this paper discusses her video/performance series "Exorcising America" as addressed to a politics of relationality and embodied survival. The series provides a way of thinking about practices of vulnerability in a context of protracted colonial, racial, and sexual violence. This paper asks how these “exercises” or “exorcisms”—as heuristics, exertions, procedures—might focus attention on the uncomfortable relation between, or bind of, violability and vulnerability, violence and capacity, knowing and unknowing. The videos parody a genre that trades on its claims to instill a confidence, self-possessed agency, and improvement untroubled by unconscious drives, ambivalence, and unevenly distributed premature death. However much the exercises perform a casting out, a conjured expulsion of “America,” of colonial possession, an undertaking of making unpossessed, the destructive forces that occupy and devour stolen lands and render life bare linger. Viewers are compelled to ask what sort of visceral or eviscerated trace lives on across the unsettled relations of aspiration and refusal, autonomy and subjection, intimacy and separation that these lessons enact.
Race & Capitalism
* For a revised and expanded version of this paper, see "'In the Constant Flux of Its Incessant R... more * For a revised and expanded version of this paper, see "'In the Constant Flux of Its Incessant Renewal': The Social Reproduction of Racial Capitalism and Settler Colonial Entitlement": https://www.academia.edu/75944463/_In_the_Constant_Flux_of_Its_Incessant_Renewal_The_Social_Reproduction_of_Racial_Capitalism_and_Settler_Colonial_Entitlement_Uncorrected_Proofs_
This paper focuses on the ways in which property relations and prevailing conceptions of ownership are key sites for the social reproduction of race, capitalism, and the particularities of U.S. settler colonialism. I begin with a consideration of racial capitalism in relation to reproduction. I then discuss how “so-called primitive accumulation” continues to serve as an important referent in debates on the relationship between colonialism and capitalism. In conclusion, I briefly consider the ongoing fractionation of Native American land in the wake of the 1887 allotment act and the attrition of African American land ownership through the partition of tenancy-in-common of heirs’ property. I use these examples to show how the racial, colonial, gendered, and generational making of property and the capacity for possession are both a consequence of particular historical conditions of dispossession and continue to be reproduced in new ways in the present. Inheritance in this sense is quite literally a matter of social reproduction and a site of struggle over power and history in the context of the current moment.
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Papers by Alyosha Goldstein
How do Indigenous relational practices unsettle or otherwise challenge colonial border
regimes? How does Indigeneity “travel” for those Indigenous peoples who have been displaced or who have chosen to live in places other than their historical homelands? How might the practices of people in the context of forced mobility, who aspire to cross a border to elsewhere or to return to their homes, be reflective of something other than the desire to settle in a land?
The contributors to Biopolitics, Geopolitics, Life investigate biopolitics and geopolitics as two distinct yet entangled techniques of settler colonial states across the globe, from the Americas and Hawai‘i to Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand. Drawing on literary and cultural studies, social sciences, political theory, visual culture, and film studies, they show how biopolitics and geopolitics produce norms of social life and land use that delegitimize and target Indigenous bodies, lives, lands, and political formations. Among other topics, the contributors explore the representations of sexual violence against Native women in literature, Indigenous critiques of the carceral state in North America, Indigenous Elders’ refusal of dominant formulations of aging, the governance of Indigenous peoples in Guyana, the displacement of Guaraní in Brazil, and the 2016 formal acknowledgement of a government-to-government relationship between the US federal government and the Native Hawaiian community. Throughout, the contributors contend that Indigenous life and practices cannot be contained and defined by the racialization and dispossession of settler colonialism, thereby pointing to the transformative potential of an Indigenous-centered decolonization.
Contributors. René Dietrich, Jacqueline Fear-Segal, Mishuana Goeman, Alyosha Goldstein, Sandy Grande, Michael R. Griffiths, Shona N. Jackson, Kerstin Knopf, Sabine N. Meyer, Robert Nichols, Mark Rifkin, David Uahikeaikaleiʻohu Maile
by the Trump administration’s shock-and-awe tactics compounded
the brutally uneven distribution of exposure, social atomization, precarity,
abandonment, and premature death under the COVID-19 pandemic.
The pandemic has had especially lethal consequences for those who are
impoverished, racially abjected, and deemed violable or disposable within
economies of dispossession. For Indigenous peoples under US occupation,
the mainstream news coverage of the pandemic’s death toll on the
Navajo Nation, on Standing Rock, and on other Indigenous nations came
and went with little sustained inquiry into the conditions of colonization,
critical for understanding the current moment. The obstinate negligence
of the CARES Act toward peoples and communities most impacted by
the pandemic is only one example of this intensified necropolitics. We
focus here on conceptions and mobilizations of care and uncaring, and
the catastrophe of the settler-capitalist state at this time. With all the
talk about the need for self-care and community care in this period of
concentrated epic crises, we ask: How does the discourse of care operate
within an imperial social formation? Is an otherwise possible? What are
our obligations in kinship and reciprocity? And how do we attend to these
obligations in times of imposed distance?
This paper focuses on the ways in which property relations and prevailing conceptions of ownership are key sites for the social reproduction of race, capitalism, and the particularities of U.S. settler colonialism. I begin with a consideration of racial capitalism in relation to reproduction. I then discuss how “so-called primitive accumulation” continues to serve as an important referent in debates on the relationship between colonialism and capitalism. In conclusion, I briefly consider the ongoing fractionation of Native American land in the wake of the 1887 allotment act and the attrition of African American land ownership through the partition of tenancy-in-common of heirs’ property. I use these examples to show how the racial, colonial, gendered, and generational making of property and the capacity for possession are both a consequence of particular historical conditions of dispossession and continue to be reproduced in new ways in the present. Inheritance in this sense is quite literally a matter of social reproduction and a site of struggle over power and history in the context of the current moment.