Abstract: Focusing on Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s 2008 apology to the Stolen Generations, this article asks: can colonial-settler states obtain forgiveness through political apologies? The article first defends Jacques Derrida’s observation that political apologies resemble the Christian practice of confession. In doing so, it subsequently draws on Michel Foucault’s (1979) detailed treatise on confession […]

Abstract: This article examines the recent Israeli Nationality Law within a historical context. It argues that the law in many ways manifests the settler-colonial identity of the State of Israel and as such the law embodies clearly both the achievements of the Zionist movement and Zionist future designs. The law is not an extreme right-wing […]

Abstract: This PhD thesis aims to expand on the ‘logic of elimination’ of the settler colonial projects by analyzing in depth its dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, who is eligible to exist, and /or to be counted in these projects with a specific focus on Palestine as a case study; compared with three cases of […]

Abstract: This essay traces the Zionist conversion of iconic revolutionary folk singer Mercedes Sosa to theorize the shifting forms of racial empire in the movement from the Dirty War to the War on Terror. I read Sosa’s story as emblematic of the thwarted revolutionary dreams of the late twentieth century and the subsequent forms of […]

Abstract: Towards Decolonial Futures: New Media, Digital Infrastructures, and Imagined Geographies of Palestine explores the unexpected breaks and fault-lines within Israeli settler-colonialism that are exacerbated by new media objects and practices. The dissertation examines both content and form of media that represent Palestine, revealing the limitations and possibilities of new media objects to provide a […]

Excerpt: ORYX AND CRAKE, the first novel of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian MaddAddam trilogy, presents the social order of the relatively near future as suffering from the effects of environmental degradation and dehumanization caused by a rapacious, globalized capitalism. In the novel, what Greg Garrard describes as the “corrosive power of modernity” (239) has not been […]

Description: In Writing Belonging at the Millennium, Emily Potter critically considers the long-standing settler-colonial pursuit of belonging manifested through an obsession with firm and stable ground. This pursuit continues across the field of the postcolonial nation today; the recognition of colonization’s destructive impacts on humans and environments troublingly generates a renewed desire to secure non-indigenous belonging. […]

Description: In The Black Shoals Tiffany Lethabo King uses the shoal—an offshore geologic formation that is neither land nor sea—as metaphor, mode of critique, and methodology to theorize the encounter between Black studies and Native studies. King conceptualizes the shoal as a space where Black and Native literary traditions, politics, theory, critique, and art meet in productive, […]

Description: While cities like Winnipeg, Minneapolis, Saskatoon, Rapid City, Edmonton, Missoula, Regina, and Tulsa are places where Indigenous marginalization has been most acute, they have also long been sites of Indigenous placemaking and resistance to settler colonialism. Although such cities have been denigrated as “ordinary” or banal in the broader urban literature, they are exceptional […]

Abstract: Local and national contexts shape the way people commemorate the Jewish Holocaust. In settler-colonial contexts, Holocaust memory has a tendency to marginalize Indigenous peoples and obscure histories of colonial violence. In 2017 Canada unveiled its first national site dedicated exclusively to the Holocaust—the National Holocaust Monument (NHM)—several blocks away from the federal Parliament buildings […]