« Settler colonialism in the Golan Heights: Gideon Sulimani, Raz Kletter, ‘Settler-Colonialism and the Diary of an Israeli Settler in the Golan Heights: The Notebooks of Izhaki Gal’, Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies, 19, 1, 2022
An old story about German settler colonialism in the east (it is worrying that it should come out now and that it should be told in these terms): Piotr Guzowski, ‘Eastward Migration in European History: The Interplay of Economic and Environmental Opportunities’, in Adam Izdebski, John Haldon, Piotr Filipkowski, (eds), Perspectives on Public Policy in Societal-Environmental Crises: What the Future Needs from History, Springer, 2022, pp. 325-332 »

The ruin of settler colonialism: Samia Rahimtoola, ‘Ruin Gazing: Robert Frost and the Afterlives of Settler Environmentalism’, The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, 64, 2018, pp. 144-171

16Jul22

Abstract: This article considers a paradox that structures the internal logic of the ideology of improvement, a central justification for settler colonialism’s strategies of cultural and material dispossession. Far from establishing a limit to settler colonialism as predicted by the writings of John Locke, scenes of ruined, abandoned land are seen to extend settler sovereignty. Specifically, the article examines settler representations of, and encounters with, ruin in the poetry of Robert Frost to argue that irony’s “infinite absolute negativity,” as Søren Kierkegaard states, enables settler subjects to defend against the threat of settler dissolution and magnify settler subjectivity. In a contemporary moment in which damage and devastation have become dominant modes of settler presence on the land, Frost’s poetry prepares us to consider the settler histories of ruin gazing that remain sedimented within contemporary environmental discourse.


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