Dr. Brandi Bushman is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies. She holds a BA in English from UC Santa Barbara and an MA and PhD in English from Princeton University. Prior to joining the Ethnic Studies Department at UC Berkeley, Dr. Bushman was a Mellon Gateway Postdoctoral Fellow in Native American and Indigenous Studies at Brown University. She is an enrolled member of the Picayune Rancheria of Chukchansi Indians.
Dr. Bushman is an interdisciplinary cultural historian with expertise in Native American literature, literary and critical theory, and history and politics of Native California. Her research interests also include histories of social movements and class struggle, Black studies, decolonial theory, and gender and sexuality studies. She broadly examines United States settler colonialism and projects of racialization and capital accumulation in America, as well as the political, social, and affective fallout of such projects for Native American people.
Her current book project, Sovereignty’s Glitch: Negative Affects and Structures of Feeling in Native American Literature, studies a host of 21st century Native American literatures out of the American West that illuminate the experience of social death for Native people in the contemporary. Through the frameworks of Marxist theory and affect theory, Sovereignty’s Glitch considers how these felt experiences cannot be ameliorated through either projects of tribal nationalism or American neoliberal projects of multicultural inclusion or recognition. By tracing experiences of illegibility, exile, fugitivity, and denied subjectivity across Native American novels and poetry, the project examines how such expressions contain desires to defy captivity and incorporation into the liberal logics of the settler state. She is interested in how dilating these moments, rather than offering recuperative possibility, might refute logics of remedy, repair, and inclusion and, in so doing, refuse continued practices of making coherent (or, even, settling) the settler colonial project of America.
