Climate fiction as settler absolution: Nicole Seymour, ‘Comedy as White Immunity: Settler-Colonial Evasions in Contemporary US Cli-Fi’, Literature and Medicine, 44, 1, 2026, pp. 120-146

14Nov26

Abstract: This essay focuses on a set of recent US cli-fi novels that dance around settler colonialism—a primary driver of climate change—via comedic asides and other evasions. Comedy thus functions here as immunity in the sense of a conceptual prophylactic, allowing both white characters and white writers to imagine future adaptions that do not require a processing of the past or present. I link this metaphorical type of immunity to the literal, considering settler biowarfare (forced sterilization, spread of disease to nonimmune persons, etc.) and other attempts at Indigenous extermination as the unspoken background to these novels.


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Settlers with Bibles: Emily Colgan, Brian Fiu Kolia, Michael Mawson (eds), Rereading the Bible in the Wake of Colonisation, Routledge, 2027

13Nov26

Description: This book explores the complex relationships between the Bible, colonization, and ecology in Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, Pasifika, and parts of Asia. Bringing together theologians, biblical scholars, and activists, the book critically engages with the historical and ongoing uses of biblical texts in colonization and the reshaping of environmental contexts. The book also showcases some ways in which scholars have recently been developing alternative hermeneutical approaches and ways of contesting these texts. Ecological hermeneutics has, at times, unhelpfully created a dichotomy between human and other-than-human beings, separating humanity from environmental contexts. Central to the contributions in this book is an intentional re-casting of human beings within the so-called ecological realm. By focusing on coloniality and the conquest of Indigenous communities, this book broadens understandings of “ecology” and aims to attend to how the colonization of human beings goes hand in hand with ecological conquest and domination. Rereading the Bible in the Wake of Colonisation is of great use for students and scholars interested in decolonizing ecological histories and theologies, as well as those studying the Bible and ecology more broadly.


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On settler emplacement: Nancy Menning, ‘Emplacement, the Settler Colonial Imagination, and Decolonization’, in Daniel Boscaljon, Verna Marina Ehret (eds), Engaging Culture, Nature, and Religion: Forrest Clingerman and the Importance of Emplacement, Bloomsbury, 2026

11Nov26

Access the chapter hehttps://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/engaging-culture-nature-and-religion-9798216454205/


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Diplomacy and evasion: Annemarie McLaren, ‘Indigenous Diplomacy and Colonial Entanglement Through the Native Institution of New South Wales’, History Compass, 2026

11Nov26

Abstract: This article examines the Native Institution, the first residential school for Aboriginal children in the British colony of New South Wales. It is well known and recognised as an early example of institutional child removal and assimilationist ideas that would later be known in Australia as the Stolen Generations. Yet, the Native Institution was also short‐lived. In colonial terms, it ‘failed’, as it could neither attract enough voluntary submission of children—nor retain them. This article looks again at the Native Institution to consider it through Indigenous practices of diplomacy and broader Indigenous‐settler relations. I argue that the Native Institution (1814–1829) functioned as a site of intricate intercultural negotiation, as well as more subtle Indigenous evasion. Aboriginal individuals and clan groups navigated the entangling terrain of settler‐colonialism with political acumen, drawing deeply on their own cultural repertoires of diplomacy, adapted to new and urgent realities. By focusing on diplomacy, this paper offers a different perspective on the institution’s legacy and contributes to a deeper understanding of Indigenous political agency in intercultural worlds.


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Unfree workers, but then settlers: Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, Michael Quinlan, Unfree Workers: Insubordination and Resistance in Convict Australia, 1788-1860, Palgrave, 2022

09Nov26

Description: This book examines how convicts played a key role in the development of capitalism in Australia and how their active resistance shaped both workplace relations and institutions. It highlights the contribution of convicts to worker mobilization and political descent, forcing a rethink of Australia’s foundational story. It is a book that will appeal to an international audience, as well as the many hundreds of thousands of Australians who can trace descent from convicts. It will enable the latter to make sense of the experience of their ancestors, equipping them with the necessary tools to understand convict and court records. It will also provide a valuable undergraduate and postgraduate teaching tool and reference for those studying unfree labour and worker history, social history, colonization and global migration in a digital age.


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Is it time? Andrew Thibaudeau, ‘”The Last of the Monacan”: Settler Time and Queer Time in “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains”‘, Poe Studies, 59, 2026, pp. 93-116

09Nov26

Abstract: This essay not only reassesses Edgar Allan Poe’s legacy in conversation with widely circulated Early American myths about Indigenous people but also uncovers a radical, queer nineteenthcentury temporality in Poe’s work. Examining his lesser-read story, “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” (1844), it argues that Poe confronts fictions of settler time, like the myth of disappearance, by queering time and space to champion the survivance of the Monacan people in the Ragged Mountains. With his story, Poe rewrites decades of fabulated Monacan demise, following accounts of their assimilation into other tribes and of Jefferson’s own excavation of their remains in Notes on the State of Virginia. Poe transforms the Ragged Mountains from a space of colonial occupation and archaeology to a land queerly haunted by sensuous Indian contact and unsettling rehearsals of colonial violence. Shifting supernaturally between the past in 1780 India and 1827 America to the speculative near-future of 1845, Poe both weaves British colonialism into American imperialism and forecasts the continued survival of the Monacan in the Ragged Mountains. Queer time supersedes settler time in the queer space of Poe’s Ragged Mountains, dispelling continued myths about the “last of the Monacan”.


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Sheepish settler colonialism? Irus Braverman, ‘The New Jewish Shepherd: Land Grabbing and Redemption in the Occupied West Bank’, American Anthropologist, 2026

07Nov26

Abstract: Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this article explores the recent deployment of sheep and grazing practices by Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank. The wave of herding outposts that has swept through the West Bank recently involves the use of Jewish-owned sheep to undermine and dispossess Palestinians and to re-indigenize the settlers in their place. The sheep have thus become potent yet clandestine agents of control as well as animated technologies for producing, instilling, and normalizing biblical and spiritual imaginaries of the landscape and of the Jewish people as authentically belonging to it. Backed by the state, the settlers’ mundane shepherding activities have already enabled the largest land grab in the occupied West Bank since 1967. My article contemplates this new “shepherding revolution,” as the settlers call it, situating it amid sheep-related practices in other settler colonial contexts and vis-à-vis shepherding in the state’s early years. Ultimately, I argue that studying Jewish shepherds in the West Bank expands our understanding of settler colonialism and illuminates how sheepwashing practices that position settlers as ecopastoralists are used to justify violence in the eyes of the occupying regime, exacerbating the problematic settler ecologies practiced here.


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Indigenous resistances: Linda Tabar, The Indigenous Anti-Colonial: A Palestinian Resistance Tradition and a World Beyond Settler Colonialism, Duke University Press, 2026

07Nov26

Description: In The Indigenous Anti-Colonial, Linda Tabar explores the radical tradition in which Palestinians remain defiant and undeterred as they hold onto their world and resist settler colonialism. Using a living archive of memory and oral knowledges to trace this long tradition, Tabar outlines the way Palestinians refuse and counter Zionist efforts to erase Palestinian presence and history from the land with an unyielding resistance that is distinctly Indigenous, shaped by Palestinians’ bonds with the land and the world that they built with it. This Indigenous anticolonial radical tradition produces its own imaginaries of liberation that seek a world beyond settler colonialism, white supremacy, and capitalism, constructing alternative conditions for freedom. As Israeli settler colonialism accelerates its attempts to eradicate the Palestinian people and the horrors of its genocide in Gaza are broadcast to the world, Tabar puts Palestinian conceptions of liberation at the center of conversations around settler colonialism.


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A settler for protection: Samuel Furphy, ‘Protector of Settlers? Charles Symmons and Aboriginal Protection in Western Australia, 1840-1855’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 2026

07Nov26

Abstract: This article charts the colonial career of Charles Symmons (1804–87), the inaugural Protector of Aborigines (1840–55) in Perth, Western Australia. British Imperial policies for the protection of Indigenous peoples emerged in the mid1830s, in the wake of the abolition of slavery and following the recommendations of the Select Committee on Aborigines that reported in 1837. Symmons was one of many protectors appointed in the Australasian colonies in the years that followed. He is notable for his approach to this task, principally because he placed as much emphasis on the protection of British settlers as he did Aboriginal people. This approach derived in part from the local conditions of the remote colony, which had a small population and a tenuous economy, but it can also be explained by Symmons’s background and the circumstances of his appointment. Unlike colleague protectors elsewhere in the antipodean colonies, he was not strongly motivated by a philanthropic or evangelical spirit. He is an important early example of a Protector of Aborigines, because he embodied a shift in Aboriginal policy in the mid-nineteenth century, whereby the humanitarian impulse of the 1830s was subordinated to the practical aim of safeguarding settler safety and economic interests.


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Genderising settler colonialism: Éloïse Décoste, ‘The Indian Act and the Gendered “Logic of Elimination”‘, McGill Law Journal, 71, 4, 2026, pp. 1001-1035

07Nov26

Abstract: One central feature of the Indian Act, still in force today, is the federal government’s unilateral power to define who is legally recognized as an “Indian.” For most of the Act’s history, First Nations women who married non-status men lost their status, could not transmit it to their children and were forced to leave their communities. In contrast, First Nations men retained their status and could transmit it to their non-status wives and their children. This article examines this legislated regime of genderbased discrimination and argues that it exemplifies how structural violence against Indigenous women has always been integral to Canada’s settler colonial fabric. To support this argument, it traces the trajectory of the “marry out” rule from pre-confederation laws through the 1951 reform of the Indian Act. The article then demonstrates how the imposition of a Victorian model of gender relations undermined Indigenous women’s roles and advanced settler colonialism. Finally, it shows how gender-differentiated harms persist despite the formal repeal of the discriminatory provisions in 1985. The article concludes by underscoring the need for a gendered lens in evaluating the legacy of the Indian Act, particularly as efforts to harmonize Canadian law with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples raise fundamental questions about the Act’s future.


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