Nonsettler narratives: Niro Kandasamy, Michael McDonnell, ‘Powerful Stories: Indigenous and Refugee Histories of Dispossession and Displacement in Settler Colonies’, Journal of Intercultural Studies, 2025 | settler colonial studies blog

Nonsettler narratives: Niro Kandasamy, Michael McDonnell, ‘Powerful Stories: Indigenous and Refugee Histories of Dispossession and Displacement in Settler Colonies’, Journal of Intercultural Studies, 2025

31Jan25

Abstract: This paper illuminates the role of Indigenous and refugee autobiographies in serving as a radical critique of the settler colonial state. We examine the origins of self-writing in the creation of the nations of the United States and Australia before undertaking a closer examination of the proliferation of memoirs in late twentieth century and early twenty first century Australia. By tracing the powerful stories told by the dispossessed and displaced, we show how forced movements of Indigenous and refugee people are interlinked and foundational to the making of the settler colony. By centering their voices, we demonstrate that forced migrations have often been generative of new forms of self-expression, including non-textual forms such as film and poetry. The paper argues that reading the histories of settler colonial nations through these self-expressions is vital in radically revising national historical narratives that continue to privilege ideas of terra nullius, stories of ‘free’ migration, and the ‘othering’ of refugees as a contemporary ‘problem’ that is historically unprecedented.

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