« Settler penetration and appropriation are gendered: Christie Harner, ‘Louisa Anne Meredith, Ethel Pedley, and Gendered Ecological Knowledge of the Australian Bush’, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, 22, 1, 2026

Poetic fragmentation against settler mythscapes: Doro Wiese, ‘Unsettling Coloniality: Opaque White Space in the Cut-Up Poetry of Jordan Abel’s (Nisga’a) Un/Inhabited’, English Studies, 2026

11Jul26

Abstract: Nisga’a writer Jordan Abel’s Un/inhabited—a cut-up poetry collection from 91 Western novels in the public domain—disrupts, fragments and resists colonial narratives of Indigenous vanishing through the agency of its white space. Through a process of appropriation that erases, fragments and disrupts ongoing settler-colonial ideas, Un/inhabited critiques colonial practices of land-seizure and its representations, while its white space becomes a metaphor for Indigenous ways of relating to the land that make themselves felt without being articulated, resisting legibility. In this essay, it will be shown how Abel’s aesthetic procedures interrogate and dismantle the settler-colonial mythscape of the American West, shaped in the USA by popular culture and the idea of a Manifest Destiny and in Canada by legal discourses. Attention is paid to the affective presence of the white space, and Indigenous and decolonial interpretative methods that respect and relate to its opaqueness are sought and discussed.


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