Abstract: This article examines settler-colonial visuality in West Bank Jewish-Israeli settlements. It argues that settler visuality is attuned to a bourgeois ideal of domestic life, made possible by practices of unseeing. Reading Israeli encounters with the Wall and other artifacts of the occupation, I show that these visual encounters help settlers position themselves politically within Israel—and […]

Abstract: This article examines how children draw on local sources of morality and moral worth to forge connections, build friendship and enforce distinctions across difference in a rural multicultural city of settler Australia. Children’s friendship-making practices across ethnic and class differences have been widely explored in urban Australia. Far less is known about how children […]

Abstract: This article engages a form of cosmopolitanism that departs from universalist precepts, and instead underscores the role of situated difference in establishing productive dialogues among particular world views. It also works with the associated concept of the cosmopolitan stranger to delineate relationships among othered groups. Reading encounters between strangers in George Elliott Clarke’s 2016 […]

Abstract: Through a close reading of Joe Sacco’s Paying the Land (2020), a graphic novel about the struggle of the Dene people in Canada’s Northwestern territories, this article shows how Sacco effects a “peripheral realism” that draws the systemic continuities of different phases of colonial modernity into view. The article then describes Sacco’s “terrestrial realism,” […]

Abstract: What does the story of European domination of the land and peoples of the “new world” tell us about the ideals and the realities of American political development? A republic founded on the high ideals of equality, fairness, and liberty was also a nation build on violence and racism. How did these “two countries” […]

Abstract: Nisga’a writer Jordan Abel created Un/inhabited by rearranging and deleting large swathes of ninety-one western novels. Unsurprisingly, then, this poem is largely interpreted as an invitation to readers to join Abel in critically examining the colonial mindset underpinning the western genre. While this alone makes the poem a valuable resource in literary studies classrooms, I look […]

Abstract: Canada and Australia each have long histories of containing Indigenous peoples and migrants. The overincarceration of Indigenous peoples continues to worsen in both countries, despite targeted reforms. Migrant detention is on the rise worldwide, with Canada and Australia’s systems understood as among the harshest. This thesis explores why Canada and Australia contain these populations […]

Access the dissertation here.

Abstract: Gondwanaland was a southern mega-continent that began to break up 180 million years ago. This article explores Gondwanaland’s modern history, its unexpected political and cultural purchase since the 1880s. Originating with geological and palaeontological research in the Gond region of Central India, ‘Gondwana’ has become recognisable and useful, especially in settler colonial contexts. This […]

Abstract: This dissertation examines the tremendous expansion of university education across Britain’s colonies of settlement and their self-governing successors – Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, and the United States – from new universities’ shaky beginnings at the start of the nineteenth century to their firm foundations and continued growth a century later. Imperial, national, […]