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On the ‘settler photographer’: Rachel McLean Sailor, Meaningful Places: Landscape Photographers in the Nineteenth-Century American West, University of New Mexico Press, 2014 »

Anna Boswell, ‘The sensible order of the eel’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2015

18Feb15

Abstract: As an embodiment of the energy of the life-world and a lawmaker within the terms of a Maori world view, the longfin eel (or tuna) teaches how to live responsibly in place. This paper follows the shimmering trail of the eel, encountering environmental contradiction and catastrophe in its path. Revealing the death-world of settler colonial reconstruction and the bad faith that underpins latter-day conservation agendas in so-called new world places, the eel destabilises settler certainties and calls forth a set of problems – ecological, pedagogical and constitutional – that refuse to remain submerged.


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