« Settler-colonial capitalism is ‘custodial’: Tim Rowse, ‘Indigenous Self-determination Under Settler Colonial Capitalism: Northern Territory Cattle Communities 1968–96’, Australian Historical Studies, 50, 4, 2019, pp. 503-521
Can settler consciousness be transformed? Jesse Whattam, The Possibilities of Transforming Settler Consciousness: Community Spaces and White Settler Responsibility, MA Dissertation, Carleton University, 2019 »

Settler digressions: Timothy Donahue, ‘Styles of Sovereignty: Parataxis, Settler–Indigenous Difference, and the Transnationalisms of the Great Basin’, American Literary History, 2019

20Nov19

Excerpt: “I digress constantly,” declares the narrator of Roughing It (1872), Mark Twain’s semi-autobiographical account of “variegated vagabondizing” in the North American West (331, xxxi).1 With this aside, Twain calls attention to the way he depicts spaces where US settlement was far from an accomplished fact. Most of Roughing It is set in early-1860s Nevada—which had been a part of Mexico just more than a decade earlier—where Indigenous people contested US occupancy and where the new territorial government struggled to assert sovereignty. The narrator’s declaration casts the presentation of this milieu in Roughing It as “constantly” digressive.


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