Stefano Liberti (ed.), Land Grabbing: Journeys in the New Colonialism, trans. Enda Flannelly (London: Verso Books, 2013). A shocking exposé of how modern-day corporations and governments are raiding the Third World To the governments and corporations buying up vast tracts of the Third World, it is ‘land leasing’; to its critics, it is nothing better […]

Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Indigenes and Settlers (Fourth World)’, A Companion to Global Historical Thought (2014). This chapter focuses on the reasons why history-writing remains so controversial in the settler national historiographies. The author argues that embracing a historical methodology or rejecting it altogether is part of a dilemma that is specific to the settler colonial “situation”. In […]

Sheila Collingwood-Whittick, ‘Discursive manipulations of names and naming in Kate Grenville’s “The secret river”‘, Commonwealth Essays and Studies 36, 1 (2013). This article stems from two observations arising from my reading of Kate Grenville’s three-part exploration of Anglo-Australia’s frontier history. The first is that, contrary to Grenville’s averred commitment to telling the unvarnished truth about […]

Nadine Attewell, Better Britons: Reproduction, Nation, and the Afterlife of Empire (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014). In 1932, Aldous Huxley published Brave New World, his famous novel about a future in which humans are produced to spec in laboratories. Around the same time, Australian legislators announced an ambitious experiment to “breed the colour” out […]

Gabriel Piterberg, ‘Review: Between Indigenous and Settler Governance’, Journal of Global History 9, 1 (2014). Comparative settler colonialism as a scholarly field is relatively recent. The foundational works evinced critical interest in the white settlers and only indirectly in the indigenes, even if the critique was radical. They insisted that the dispossession and elimination of the native […]

Alison Bashford, ‘Immigration restriction: rethinking period and place from settler colonies to postcolonial nations’, Journal of Global History 9, 1 (2014). Immigration acts have long been analysed as instrumental to the working of the modern nation-state. A particular focus has been the racial exclusions and restrictions that were adopted by aspirationally white, new world nation-states: […]

Audra Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2014). Mohawk Interruptus is a bold challenge to dominant thinking in the fields of Native studies and anthropology. Combining political theory with ethnographic research among the Mohawks of Kahnawà:ke, a reserve community in what is now southwestern Quebec, […]

Edward Cavanagh, ”Possession and Dispossession in Corporate New France, 1600–1663: Debunking a “Juridical History” and Revisiting Terra Nullius’, Law & History Review 32, 1 (2014). Following Jacques Cartier’s voyages up and down the St. Lawrence River in 1534, 1535–36 and 1541–42, French interest in the region surged. This interest was confined to the region’s potential […]

Unsettlement and Decolonization: New Directions A Conference Organized by Dr. Michael R. Griffiths   Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, Columbia University. Confirmed Plenary Speakers: Kevin Bruyneel (Politics, Babson College); Jodi A. Byrd (English and American Indian Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign); Mark Rifkin (English and Women’s and Gender Studies, University of North Carolina at Greensboro); Dale Turner […]