Settler literary land claims: David Kootnikoff, ‘A Romance of Denialism: In the Skin of a Lion as a Settler Literary Land Claim’, Canadian Literature, 257, 2025 | settler colonial studies blog

Settler literary land claims: David Kootnikoff, ‘A Romance of Denialism: In the Skin of a Lion as a Settler Literary Land Claim’, Canadian Literature, 257, 2025

06Jan25

Abstract: In “A Romance of Denialism: In the Skin of a Lion As A Settler Literary Land Claim,” I identify an aesthetic theme in Michael Ondaatje’s 1987 novel, In the Skin of a Lion, that parallels settler colonialism’s political response to Indigenous peoples and their lands. I argue that Ondaatje’s novel adheres to what Margery Fee identifies as a “literary land claim” (2015), one that legitimizes settlers as indigenes on “terra nullius” by denying Indigenous presence. I demonstrate this by extending GW Hegel’s aesthetic model of “romantic fiction” (592) to In the Skin of a Lion and suggest the latter embodies the attributes of a narrative that comforts settlers (Battell Lowman & Barker). By analyzing the inward quest of “electability,” which relies on a subject who retreats from the social world, I expose how a “violence of denialism” functions to invisibilize Indigenous presence.

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