ebooks Texas: Crossroads of North America by Jesus F. De la Teja; Ron Tyler; Nancy Beck Young in History

Description

The Literary and Legal Genealogy of Native American Dispossession offers a unique interpretation of how literary and public discourses influenced three U.S. Supreme Court Rulings written by Chief Justice John Marshall with respect to Native Americans. These cases; Johnson v. M’Intosh (1823); Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831) and Worcester v. Georgia (1832); collectively known as the Marshall Trilogy; have formed the legal basis for the dispossession of indigenous populations throughout the Commonwealth. The Trilogy cases are usually approached as ‘pure’ legal judgments. This book maintains; however; that it was the literary and public discourses from the early sixteenth through to the early nineteenth centuries that established a discursive tradition which; in part; transformed the American Indians from owners to ‘mere occupants’ of their land. Exploring the literary genesis of Marshall’s judgments; George Pappas draws on the work of Michel Foucault; Edward Said and Homi Bhabha; to analyse how these formative U.S. Supreme Court rulings blurred the distinction between literature and law.