Abstract: Genocide and settler colonialism are conceptually related ideas, although the specific relationship remains unclear. Whereas some scholars develop subcategories of “colonial genocide” or examine the historical origins of these concepts, I address the signification of “genocide” and “indigeneity.” I explore the system of meanings underlying each concept to suggest that both are paradoxically rooted […]

Abstract: In this essay, I aim to engage the growing body of scholarship that employs Indigenous feminist theories to understand and mobilize against the sexual and gendered violence committed against Native peoples. To accomplish this, I construct a Native feminist analysis of the 2010 Tribal Law and Order Act. I posit that despite the overwhelmingly […]

Abstract: Transitional justice is a complex form of political and legal intervention used by state governments to redress state-sanctioned and large-scale harms (Balint, Evans, & McMillan, 2014). The typical aims of this model include maintaining peace during times of political flux, installing rule-of law, creating new historical narratives, and reconciliation (Teitel, 2003). In both theory […]

Description: In her study of the unsuccessful nineteenth-century emigrant, Tamara S. Wagner argues that failed emigration and return drive nineteenth-century writing in English in unexpected, culturally revealing ways. Wagner highlights the hitherto unexplored subgenre of anti-emigration writing that emerged as an important counter-current to a pervasive emigration propaganda machine that was pressing popular fiction into […]

Abstract: In an era concerned with the survival of Indigenous languages, language as a general phenomenon needs to be thought of as thoroughly connected to one’s worldview. In this article, I propose a different conception of language that sides more with what I call ‘the worlding of things’ than linguistics. To foreshadow my speculations on […]

Excerpt: For the first time, this Special Issue brings to the attention of Wasafiri‘s readers two poetry communities with which many will be unfamiliar: those of South Africa and Australia. These might be regarded as literary micro-climates, which the prevailing winds of postcolonial and world literature often sweep past. Each has its peculiar dynamic specific […]

Abstract: Purpose: This article offers an example of a comprehensive mid-nineteenth century branding strategy in practice. Design/methodology/approach: The article follows an historical research methodology using archival resources and secondary sources within a conceptual framework of present-day branding theory (Bastos and Levy) and communication theory (Perloff). It interrogates visual and material data to construct a production-led […]

Decription: The history of Indian removal has often followed a single narrative arc, one that begins with President Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act of 1830 and follows the Cherokee Trail of Tears. In that conventional account, the Black Hawk War of 1832 encapsulates the experience of tribes in the territories north of the Ohio River. […]

Abstract: Focusing on the particular context of Canadian settler colonialism, this paper examines the use of museums and material culture histories to support Indigenous peoples’ political movements towards decolonisation. This paper focuses on two forms of protest; one accessible to the public and the second less so. The first example is the 1988 exhibition The […]

Abstract: Fascism’s success in building communities and structures of conviviality was for many years avoided by the critical scholarship on Italian fascism. More recently, however, fascist land reclamation has become a favored topic in Italian historiographical revisionism: it has become an argument for the regime’s “revolutionary” aspects. This article argues that “land reclamation” was a […]