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‘Spanish’ and settler question: Daniela Edmeier, ‘The Spanish Question: Migration, Identity, and Settler Politics in French Algeria, 1830-1939’, PhD dissertation, Ohio State University, 2025 »

The ‘quarry noir’ of settler colonialism: Meg Brayshaw, ‘Quarry noir: Settler anxiety and the politics of mining in contemporary Australian crime fiction’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2025

07Jun25

Abstract: This article contributes new knowledge to understanding of the effects of extractivism on literature by examining the relationship between settler colonialism, resource extraction, and the operation of genre. It analyses a suite of Australian novels that harness the generic affordances of crime to address contemporary anxieties about the social, environmental, and political impacts of the nation’s reliance on mining. Drawing on definitions of noir that position it as a mode centred on tensions between desire and anxiety, this article classifies these novels as examples of “quarry noir”. The quarry is a site of depletion that symbolizes accumulation. This contradiction informs the novels’ anxious registration of resource extraction as desired and abhorrent. Manifesting when the formulaic crime narrative is complicated by a politicized anxiety that influences the text’s form, style, and tropology, quarry noir shows how literature addresses and is shaped by the extractive logic of the settler colony.


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