The climate settler colonialist: Philip Steer, ‘Narrating Migration in the Settler Colonies: From Systematic Colonization to the Climate Refugee’, in Corina Stan, Charlotte Sussman (eds), The Palgrave Handbook of European Migration in Literature and Culture, Palgrave 2023, pp 19-35 | settler colonial studies blog

The climate settler colonialist: Philip Steer, ‘Narrating Migration in the Settler Colonies: From Systematic Colonization to the Climate Refugee’, in Corina Stan, Charlotte Sussman (eds), The Palgrave Handbook of European Migration in Literature and Culture, Palgrave 2023, pp 19-35

24Nov23

Abstract: This chapter argues that present-day attempts by settler novelists in Australia and New Zealand to conceptualize the migration of climate refugees are shaped by formal approaches that were developed to comprehend migration to the settler colonies in the nineteenth century. The early theorist of settler colonization, Edward Gibbon Wakefield, advanced two contrasting accounts of the relation between capital, migratory labor, and the nation: a “social” model that prioritized a settled and homogeneous population of nation builders, and an “investment” model that asserted the value of mobile non-white laborers. That tension between settled and mobile labor was dramatized by the late-nineteenth-century genre of the invasion novel, which gave virulent form to anti-Asian immigration sentiment. The reemergence of the thematic and formal concerns of the invasion novel in response to climate-driven migration, in novels such as Rohan Wilson’s Daughter of Bad Times (2019) and Kirsten McDougall’s She’s a Killer (2021), suggests that settler culture remains beholden to those foundational conceptual dilemmas of European migration in the nineteenth century. Those enduring limitations are further highlighted through the contrast with a short story by the Māori author, Nic Low (Ngāi Tahu), which demonstrates how differently climate migration might be conceived of in Indigenous terms.

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