Settler colonialism from the margins: Lucy Taylor, Global Politics of Welsh Patagonia: Settler Colonialism from the Margins, University of Wales Press, 2025 | settler colonial studies blog

Settler colonialism from the margins: Lucy Taylor, Global Politics of Welsh Patagonia: Settler Colonialism from the Margins, University of Wales Press, 2025

17Mar25

Description: This book is freely available on a Creative Commons licence thanks to the kind sponsorship of the libraries participating in the Jisc Open Access Community Framework OpenUP initiative. Inspired by decolonial thinking, this book challenges romantic images of Y Wladfa, the Welsh Patagonian settlement founded in 1865. Drawing on archival sources written in Spanish, Welsh and English, it exposes the complex human relationships of this settler colony, and in particular disrupts the myth of Welsh–Indigenous friendship by foregrounding Indigenous experience and revealing less familiar accounts in the record. A newly-developed framework applies three logics – possession, racialization/barbarisation, and assimilation – to make sense of settler colonialism in Patagonia and to debate Wales’s complex position as both colonised and coloniser. A new analysis of contemporary cultural products (television, film, textbooks) further demonstrates how the romantic view continues to shape racial stereotypes today, concluding that such settler origin countries as Wales are vital sites of decolonial debate.

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