Settlers and their wilderness: Rachel Fetherston, Jessica Wilson, ‘Contesting “Wilderness”: Two Settler Perspectives on Wilderness Discourse’, Swamphen, 10, 2024 | settler colonial studies blog

Settlers and their wilderness: Rachel Fetherston, Jessica Wilson, ‘Contesting “Wilderness”: Two Settler Perspectives on Wilderness Discourse’, Swamphen, 10, 2024

14Mar24

Excerpt: How, as scholars in the environmental humanities, should we approach the fraught concept of wilderness? The following reflections on wilderness discourse are written from our positions as settler scholars in the environmental humanities and as co-convenors of the ASLEC-ANZ Postgraduate and ECR Reading Group. This group was formed in 2021 in response to the ASLEC-ANZ 2021 conference theme, Ngā Tohu o te Huarere: Conversations Beyond Human Scales. Our meetings continued post-conference and we began 2022 with a discussion on ‘Contesting Wilderness’, with readings from Marcia Langton and Malcom Ferdinand. This article stems from that conversation, bringing some of our resulting thoughts to bear on our own experiences as settler scholars living in colonised place. Langton’s influential paper, ‘What Do We Mean by Wilderness? Wilderness and Terra Nullius in Australian Art’ challenges settler notions of wilderness via an engagement with settler-Australian art as just one of many examples of settler cultural expression that relies on an exclusionary and oppressive conceptualisation of ‘protected’ natural areas in Australia. Langton’s overarching argument is that ‘[t]here is no wilderness, but there are cultural landscapes’ (30). It is these landscapes that she interrogates in her paper. Central to Langton’s argument is the fact that wilderness—as a concept and as physical space—is a direct outcome of the dispossession and genocide of First Nations people worldwide. Ferdinand’s piece presents a similar argument in his contestation of the settler concept of wilderness through an exploration of marronage: ‘the practice by which Maroons—fugitive slaves—created communities in remote spaces, including secluded hills, mountains, and swamps, as refuges from where different struggles for their liberation were launched’ (184). Ferdinand’s paper is a direct response to a 2018 paper by Andreas Malm titled ‘In Wildness Lies the Liberation of the World: On Maroon Ecology and Partisan Nature’. Ferdinand argues that Malm effectively silences ‘racialized others’, such as the Maroons, through his Marxist framing and promotion of wilderness as the space in which true freedom lies (184). In light of this silencing, Ferdinand challenges ‘the ability of wilderness discourses to critically confront their colonial foundations’ and their othering of Indigenous and Black peoples, which in turn ignores, for example, the Maroons’ unique
understandings and connections with Earth (184).

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