Abstract: Edward Gibbon Wakefield is usually remembered as the English political economist whose theorisation of “systematic colonisation” provided the blueprint for the establishment of British colonies in Australia and New Zealand. This paper re-reads Wakefield’s writings on systematic colonisation as works of utopian literature, which not only represented a social fantasy that was deeply capitalist, […]

Humanities, Special Issue: New Media and Settler Colonialism: New Settler Colonial Media?

Abstract: In 1923, rural New England mill town Dover, New Hampshire, staged a Tercentenary pageant of extraordinary proportions to celebrate its “first” settlement. This public spectacle memorialized a specific, and deeply exclusionary, narrative of English settler colonialism, shaped by social anxieties of the post-First World War United States. Recent archaeological research has found possible remnants […]

Description: In 1837, a small group of rebels proclaimed the short-lived Republic of Canada. Between then and the Act of Confederation of 1867, colonial Canadians tried to imagine the future of their communities in North America. The choice between monarchy and republicanism shaped both colonial self-images and images of the United States; it also drove […]

Abstract: Connecting Finnish Petsamo to histories of settler colonialism and colonial travel writings, this chapter look at four Finnish travelogues through the settler colonial lens. It argues that these Finnish travel writers looked at Petsamo through settler colonial eyes: in other words, they made claims for Finnish settler colonization, promoted the idea, and assessed its […]

Abstract: This chapter focuses on colonialism, race, and White innocence in Finnish 1920s’ children’s literature, arguing that children’s literature was an influential channel through which colonial discourse and public colonial imagination were created, consumed, and circulated in Finland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. As an example of such literature, Merivirta examines the […]

Abstract: Dating apps have become widely used by those seeking friendship, fun, casual sex and romance. They also mimic settler violence often perpetrated in offline spaces. Although there is the opportunity for non-identification, many users who choose to identify as Aboriginal become targeted for unsolicited abuse. Dating app users are often subjected to discursive, sexual […]

Abstract: This article surveys the state of Australian literary studies in the US as evidenced from the history of institutions and organizations and the scattered work of individual American academics. The two nations share a common settler colonial history and their literary identities have been subject to a “cultural cringe” against the British centre. A […]

Abstract: This special issue showcases research exploring the work of settler individuals and groups in support of projects of decolonisation in Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, Canada and Israel. The papers gathered here were developed from presentations at an international symposium held in Auckland, New Zealand and online in February 2021. As symposium organisers and editors […]

Abstract: This paper concerns Let me tell you a story about Israel, a theatrical play tasked with influencing existing perceptions of the Palestine/Israel conflict amongst international audiences. Drawing on the work of philosopher Baruch Spinoza, I explore the complex issue of how to address the need to change people’s political perceptions by using theatre as a form […]