Abstract: This essay considers the histories of two countercultural, back-to-the-land communes located in northern California: Siskiyou County’s Black Bear Ranch and Sonoma County’s Morning Star Ranch. Both of these communes were highly influenced by the concept of Open Land, according to which anyone may freely live in a given space, particularly those individuals rejected or […]

Description: This book begins with a simple question: why do so many Dominicans deny the African components of their DNA, culture, and history? Seeking answers, Milagros Ricourt uncovers a complex and often contradictory Dominican racial imaginary. Observing how Dominicans have traditionally identified in opposition to their neighbors on the island of Hispaniola—Haitians of African descent—she […]

Excerpt: ‘When this square is thus laid off and supplied, lay off another in the same way, and so fill up the world‘. (With thanks to Alex Young)

Excerpt: In July 2014 the Center for American Progress released a study titled Missing the Point: The Real Impact of Mascots and Team Names on American Indian and Alaska Native Youth. Written by Erik Stegman and Victoria Phillips, this study further substantiated that the use of Indian team names and mascots has a clear negative […]

Excerpt: The decade following 9/11 saw a wave of state and federal legislative efforts to secure borders and identify terrorists. As evidenced perhaps most famously by the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and the passage of the Patriot Act, the “era of terror” ushered in a new relationship between national security, mobility, and […]

Abstract: This paper aims to rethink United States history from the colonial era through the Civil War and Reconstruction by examining how capitalism and empire joined together as the logic of expansion increasingly became driven by the logic of capital over approximately two hundred and fifty years. Specifically, it argues that (what became) the United […]

Excerpt: Patrick Wolfe’s Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology appeared in 1998. Wolfe’s provocation was to look for settler colonialism in the ongoing subjection of indigenous peoples in settler societies. The contemporary settler polities, he later argued, have been ‘impervious to regime change’. It was an Australian-produced response to the consolidation and global spread of […]

Abstract: Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinians in the West Bank both protested in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza during the 2014 war. They did so with what Charles Tilly would regard as distinct repertoires of contention, though they both referenced the same heritage of resistance. I argue that we should interrogate the boundaries that […]

Abstract: Native Americans have been structurally excluded from the discipline of political science in the continental United States, as has Native epistemology and political issues. I analyze the reasons for these erasures and elisions, noting the combined effects of rejecting Native scholars, political issues, analysis, and texts. I describe how these arise from presumptions inherent […]

Abstract: This article explores the hemispheric and transatlantic uses of race and empire as tropes of settler-colonial otherness in the novel The Canadian Brothers (1840) by Canadian author John Richardson. In this pre-Confederation historical novel, Richardson contrasts the imperial British discourse of racial tolerance, and the British military alliances with the Natives in the War […]