Emotional settler colonialism: Crystal McKinnon, Claire McLisky, ‘Settler-Colonial Emotions: Fear, Desire and Romance in Nineteenth-Century Historical Representations of the William Buckley Story’, in Katie Barclay, Peter N. Stearns (eds), The Routledge History of Emotions in the Modern World, Routledge, 2022 | settler colonial studies blog

Emotional settler colonialism: Crystal McKinnon, Claire McLisky, ‘Settler-Colonial Emotions: Fear, Desire and Romance in Nineteenth-Century Historical Representations of the William Buckley Story’, in Katie Barclay, Peter N. Stearns (eds), The Routledge History of Emotions in the Modern World, Routledge, 2022

27Jun22

Abstract: This chapter considers the role of emotions in settler-colonial history writing, using as a case study colonial historians’ depictions of the story of William Buckley, a British convict who spent 32 years living with the Waddawurrung people of south-western Victoria, Australia. In these histories, Buckley’s story was portrayed as a Romance, an exotic narrative full of excitement and affect, with an unlikely hero moving towards a redemptive goal. It was also marked by the settler-colonial emotions of desire for, and fear of losing, land and legitimacy. By paying attention to the emotional underpinnings of foundational mythologies, particularly contemporarily persistent ones like Buckley’s, we gain insight into the ways that emotion is used to create, build and maintain the settler-colonial state.

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