Embracing Incommensurability creates affective labor and forms contingent coalition that are necessary to interrogate and build decolonial solutions through the prioritization of indigenous futurity. Landed Affect is crucial to decolonial mobilization.

This decolonizing framework prioritizes Indigenous sovereignty and futurity, making it “incommensurable” with human and civil rights social justice projects as some elements of these processes cannot be aligned. Thus, a decolonizing project requires an “ethic of incommensurability,” which evokes a complex process of affective labor—the formation of “contingent coalitions” that may “feel very unfriendly” (, p. 35). Contingency and incommensurability mark the tricky affective terrain of building coalitions and doing cultural studies work that centers questions of Indigeneity and landedness—in ways that both align with and radically break from the work in affect studies. Affect studies has been inspired by interdisciplinary conversations across the humanities and the sciences, including psychoanalysis, theories of the body and embodiment, poststructuralism, political theory, and queer theorizations of melancholy and trauma, inspired by the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza, Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Brian Massumi. So while the affective turn has inspired many culture critics and queer theorists to productively interrogate the social, cultural, and psychoanalytic terrain of the seemingly individualized experience of feeling, sensation, and trauma, work in this field often presumes a universalized subject of emotion, unmarked by geography or even social location—and “innocent” of any complicity to settlement. What kinds of knowledges might scholars of affect studies develop if they centered questions of land, landedness, and Native dispossession? In On Sympathetic Grounds: Race, Gender, and Affective Geographies in Nineteenth-Century North America, maps emotions about, for, and from the land in contestations over the settlement of North America. Her work “excavates the land as an active participant in and literal and figurative landscape for, contestations over stewardship, territory and sovereignty” to “hold in view the displacements that constitute North America as a place” (). Foregrounding affect and geography, Greyser decenters a universal, ungrounded affective subject that often circulates within affect studies, instead attending to indigenous and settler relationships to native homelands, and the affective labor through which settlement and decolonization are mobilized. Her work challenges new materialists and affect theorists to account for a long and diverse history of tribal philosophies and practices in their thinking about matter and spirit, affect and animacy, as she attends to the uneven distribution of agency across bodies, surfaces, and substances. Affect studies draws on psychoanalytic treatments of the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real, with wholeness and lack, with memory, displacement, and haunting, to frame trauma in ways that produce “multiple subjectivities and multiple modernities expressed in new forms of history, often presented at first in autobiographical experimental writings by diasporic subjects” (, p. 6). While these writings productively interrogate conditions of knowability, representation, and memory, in the absence of a framework that foregrounds geography and the relationship between experiences of trauma and the land, they have no necessary relationship to decolonization. Dian Million (Tanana Athabascan) defines trauma as “suppos[ing] a violence that overwhelms, wounding individual (and collective) psyche, sometimes suspending access to memory” (Million, 2013, p. 2). Her definition resonates with and draw upon the work in affect studies, but Million leverages Indigenous accounts of trauma to “explode the measured ‘objective’ accounts of Canadian (and US) colonial histories” (Million, 2013, p. 31). For Million (2013), Indigenous women’s narratives are productively understood as felt knowledges that expose a “limit and boundary where white academia designated them incomprehensible,” which is inextricably linked to “the self-determination Indigenous peoples” as they “affectively work out . . . painful political, social, and personal conundrums with the state” (p. 2). So even as affect studies provides a point of entry for powerfully interrogating the conditions of trauma that resonate with Indigenous experiences as subjects of assimilation and objects of genocide and ongoing dispossession (as Million analyzes) and can be powerfully leveraged to expose processes of dispossession (in Greyser’s work), the field of affect studies remains wedded to an ungrounded, unbounded universal subject. Such land- and Indigenous-centered frameworks invite culture critics to examine how social, material, and rhetorical practices are shaped through settlement and the formation of the White subject as a settler subject. And in doing so would also entail an attention to the uneven distribution of affects and affective processes—the very constitution of some subjects as always-already affecting, while “others” are slotted as “affectable.” In her concept of ethnographic entrapment, ) articulation of the construction of the human as formed through a form of self-determination mobilized through the Western subject’s power over and distinction from “affectable others.” Building on Ferreira Da Silva’s work, argues this quality of affectability is a condition of self-determination, settlement, and racialization as the “Western subject differentiates itself from conditions of ‘affectability’ by separating from affectable others” (p. 42). Similar to cultural studies treatments of the production of Whiteness and racial difference, the racialized subject awaits humanity through a movement toward universality, yet distinct is Ferreira Da Silva and Smith’s attention to self-determination as defined by the capacity to “affect” and not be affected by others. This “humanizing” project is grounded in the notion of the sovereign subject as structured by the privatization of land that, in turn, define landed subjects through the erasure of the land theft through which the sovereignty of the settler subject is experienced, organized, and imagined. argues that Although U.S. Indian policy formally circulates the topos of self-determination, portraying the federal government as engaging with tribes’ lived sense of landedness and representations of themselves, it continues to foreclose forms of indigeneity, as a residual geopolitics predicated on principles other than those of the liberal state and as the collective memory of an ongoing history of violence. (Locations 109-110) Reading Ferreira da Silva in conversation with Rifkin underscores the structures of settler colonialism through which the sovereign subject is imagined: through his or her ability to move, affect, displace, or remove first nations people and through the ongoing erasure of various “forms of indigeneity” that belie the myth of manifest destiny.