[Minorcompositions] Unsettled – Erin Manning

[Minor Compositions]

Now available for ordering and/or free download…

*Unsettled <https://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=1618>*
Erin Manning


/Explores what it means to be claimed, not just by blood, but by 
history, land, and the fragile web of human connection./

To belong is never a simple matter. For Erin Manning, ancestry has 
always been more of an entanglement than a strict lineage: a collection 
of stories, fabulations, and echoes of the past. /Unsettled/ is a deeply 
personal and philosophical exploration of ancestry, identity, and 
belonging, particularly within the context of Québec’s settler-colonial 
history and its complex relationship with Indigeneity.

Here Manning describes her relationship with a close friend, R., who has 
lived a life shaped by poverty, subsistence farming, and a profound 
connection with the land. When R.’s mother bequeaths him their family 
land, he is left to navigate the tensions of inheritance, loss, and 
belonging. In an attempt to connect to R.’s Indigenous background, 
Manning offers to trace his genealogy. Soon, questions of what it means 
to “bestow” Indigeneity from an ancestral perspective begin to loom. 
Manning explores and critiques the practice of usurping Indigeneity in 
Québec, where claims of Métis ancestry are often leveraged for social or 
political gain, ultimately reinforcing whiteness and colonial structures 
rather than dismantling them. Through the lens of personal 
relationships, historical analysis, and philosophical inquiry, 
/Unsettled/ challenges conventional notions of ancestry, property, and 
identity, while advocating for relational belonging over bloodline 
essentialism.

“We humans need guiding narratives to name the world we want to become. 
Making a different world requires different stories. Erin Manning’s 
Unsettled steps beyond insatiable settler mythologies of self-making, 
beyond shame for their collective entitlement, and into the literal 
in-the-dirt work of uprooting white possessiveness.” – Kim TallBear, 
Professor of Indigenous Peoples, Technoscience, and Society at the 
University of Alberta

“/Unsettled/ is a courageous and consequential work that will 
productively incite some readers and inspire others.  It leans into 
openings, agonies and engagements with identity fabulation, affording 
textual time and space to marginalized rural white people and the 
pretendian phenomenon alike. Manning has written an incisive, layered 
and extraordinary work demanded by some of the most complex ethical 
dilemmas, circulating in the back waters and elite spaces, that can be 
found in the sociality of our times. Some will find the pages useful to 
rip out and position under kindling as fire-starter. It will likely 
start other kinds of fires as well…” – Peter Kulchyski, Professor of 
Native Studies at the University of Manitoba

*Bio:* Erin Manning studies in the interstices of philosophy, aesthetics 
and politics, concerned, always, about alter-pedagogical and 
alter-economic practices. Recent monographs include /The Minor Gesture/ 
(2016) and /For a Pragmatics of the Useless/ (2020). 3e is the direction 
her current artistic research takes – an exploration of the 
transversality of the three ecologies, the social, the environmental and 
the conceptual. An iteration of 3e is a land-based project north of 
Montreal where living and learning is experimented. Legacies of SenseLab 
infuse the project, particularly the question of how collectivity is 
crafted in a more-than human encounter with worlds in the making.

PDF available freely online: https://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=1618
Ordering Information: Available direct from Minor Compositions site.

Advance pre-orders for the book will be taken during September-October 
2025 (to be shipped in November). Anyone who pre-orders the book 
directly from Minor Compositions will be sent a special barcode free 
version of the book.

Release to the book trade 20 March 2026

Released by Minor Compositions, Colchester / Brooklyn / Port Watson
Minor Compositions is a series of interventions & provocations drawing 
from autonomous politics, avant-garde aesthetics, and the revolutions of 
everyday life.

Minor Compositions is an imprint of Autonomedia

-- 
Minor Compositions. Publishing the unruly, the radical, and the yet-co-come.
https://www.minorcompositions.info

Linktree of all our stuff:https://linktr.ee/minorcompositions
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