Stanford Humanities Center
Elspeth Iralu (Angami Naga) received PhD in American studies from the University of New Mexico in 2022. She writes about colonialism and decolonization, Indigenous geographies, and violence and visual culture. Her work has appeared in American Quarterly, The New Americanist, and Antipode: A Journal of Radical Geography. Her current project examines the aerial perspective as a technology of colonial territoriality.
SHC Project
Technologies of Territoriality: Indigeneity, Surveillance, and the State
Iralu’s first book project examines the global spatial surveillance of Indigenous peoples, nations, and territories in the twenty-first century through a multi-site relational analysis of colonial surveillance and Indigenous resistance in the United States, India, and Palestine. The book takes up air as a material through which to understand contrapuntal relationships of colonialism to demonstrate how air and the aerial perspective actively shape what happens on and below the ground. Analyzing Indigenous graphic novels, video games, virtual reality, performance protests, and visual art, Iralu argues that Indigenous experiences of surveillance are not limited by the geographic and legal bounds of nation-states but are rather linked through global histories of militarization and resistance.
