Eric Cheyfitz
Eric Cheyfitz, the Ernest I. White Professor of American Studies and Humane Letters at Cornell University, is a faculty member of the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program (AIISP).
Early life and education
Eric Cheyfitz was born June 17, 1941, in Toledo, Ohio, to Edward (Eddie) T. Cheyfitz. (1914–1959, born in Montreal, Canada) and Julia (Pollack) Cheyfitz (1918–2003), born in Cleveland, Ohio. His father was a noted labor organizer who was friendly with Jimmy Hoffa. He moved the family to Washington, D.C., in 1945 and later went into private law practice with Edward Bennett Williams before dying suddenly of a heart attack at age 45.
Cheyfitz attended the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, from 1959–1961 but left before graduating to pursue his own writing in poetry and music. When he decided to resume his education in the mid-1970s, he was accepted into the master's program in creative writing at Johns Hopkins University despite the fact that he hadn't received an undergraduate degree. He then went on to receive a PhD in Comparative Literature from Johns Hopkins in 1979.
Academic Career
Upon earning his PhD, Cheyfitz was hired as a member of the English department at Georgetown University. He remained at Georgetown from 1979–1990. It was during his time at Georgetown that he began researching and writing what would become his landmark book The Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from The Tempest to Tarzan. Cheyfitz next taught at Southern Methodist University from 1990–1993 and the University of Pennsylvania from 1993–2003 before arriving at Cornell University in 2003.
Cheyfitz has served as director of the AIISP, the faculty coordinator of the Mellon-Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program, and the director of the Mellon Post-doctoral Diversity Seminar. His scholarship and teaching focus on the force of settler colonialism on Indigenous peoples and their ongoing resistance in the form of alternative ways of thought and action to the predatory capitalism embedded in settler existence. Exemplary of this work are his award-winning book The Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from The Tempest to Tarzan (1991, 1997), which was named by Choice as one of the outstanding academic books of 1991; and his co-edited volume Sovereignty, Indigeneity, and the Law, a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly, which won the award for the best special issue of an academic journal in 2011 given by the Council of Editors of Learned Journals and was acknowledged for "Outstanding Indigenous Scholarship" in the same year by the American Indian and Alaska Native Professors Association.
In 2019, he published The Disinformation Age: The Collapse of Liberal Democracy in the United States (PaperBoat Press, 2019), which, in its final chapter, “Thinking From A Different Place: What Is A Just Society?”, offers, beyond “the limits of capitalism’s imagination,” an Indigenous alternative to the way out of the current crisis of climate collapse and wealth inequality. His current work focuses on the intersection of settler colonialism in Palestine and Native America, which includes an essay in the forthcoming Cambridge History of Native American Literature. He has written four books and published over forty articles in journals, books, and other media, including such titles as “The Force of Exceptionalist Narratives in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict”; “Israel, Palestine, And the Poetics of Genocide”; “Native American Literature and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples”; and “Reading Global Indigenous Resistance in Simon Ortiz’s Fight Back.” He has appeared on radio and in film and can be seen in the forthcoming documentary The Story of Wealth. His scholarship is joined by his social action work both in Indian country and on behalf of Palestinian rights.
References
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