Excerpt: Since 2000, older American exceptionalist narratives have been challenged anew by what has come to be known as Settler Colonial Theory (SCT). Spearheaded in the late 1980s by Canadian and Australian literary theorists Alan Lawson, Helen Tiffin, Steven Slemon, and Bill Ashcroft, the field found its taxonomy and maturation in work by dominion-based historians and anthropologists Lorenzo Veracini, Peter Wolfe, Lisa Ford, and James Belich. Early Americanists such as Lawrence Buell and others began applying its ideas in the 1990s, but they also incorporated ideas about American imperialism running back through William Appelmans Williams and Amy Kaplan. Since 2010, SCT has contributed to the broader proliferation the dynamic field of early American studies in many and metamorphic ways.
