Abstract: This article introduces a method for analyzing Indigenous erasure in popular film that focuses not on the representations (or lack thereof) of Indigenous peoples but on representations of settlement. Whereas much of the scholarship on Native representations in film has been concerned with Hollywood’s promulgation of the “mythical Indian,” I argue that a focus […]

Abstract: Italy’s colonial expansion is an interesting case study within the settler colonial world. Although discontinuous, settlement was always present as a founding element of its colonial discourse and practice. In Libya – more than in other Italian colonies like little and sparsely populated Eritrea and Somalia, or the short-lived ‘Empire’ of Ethiopia – the […]

Abstract: This article is focuses on transracial Indigenous adoption, or what has come to be known in the Canadian context as the ‘Sixties Scoop’ or the ‘Canada scoop’, and its devastating effects on survivors’ lives. While there is some acknowledgement of the sheer number of forced Indigenous transracial adoptions in Canada in the twentieth century, […]

Abstract: Focusing on Guy Maddin’s 2002 film Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary, this essay argues that by rejecting Hollywood’s iconic images of Dracula in favor of a silent, montage-heavy ballet performance film, Maddin calls attention to the exclusion of Dracula’s own perspective from Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel. As a result, Maddin makes parallels between […]

Abstract: This article discusses an aspect of Hannah Arendt’s treatment of the conflict between the Zionists and the Palestinians that has thus far been overlooked in scholarship: her justification of Zionism through the achievements of the Jewish pioneers in cultivating the land, in contrast to the Palestinians’ failure to do so. The inability of natives […]

Abstract: This article examines the political and ideological uses of agronomic research, focusing on state-directed rural white settlements in Angola. Implemented ‘against the tide’, in the mid-1950s, with Angola’s African anti-colonial movement already under way, these schemes contained numerous contradictions. Under a modernising agenda, the Estado Novo dictatorship created the colonatos of Cela and Cunene, […]

Abstract: During the 1880s there was fierce debate in colonial Australia and throughout the English-speaking world about the functioning of increasingly democratic societies and especially who, in terms of race, class and gender, was qualified to participate in the political process. In this formative period of what later became known as the “White Australia policy”, […]

Excerpt: As Lawrence Buell has observed, the pastoral, which in the ‘old’ worlds of Europe was a type of symbolic allegory not expected to be taken literally, became in Europe’s ‘new’ worlds of settler colonialism, such as the United States and Australia, ‘a vehicle of national self-definition’ as well as a template for the construction […]

Excerpt: Richard White is a historian, not a mad scientist. Yet the career of one of his most celebrated works, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (1991), is rather like the story of Victor Frankenstein and his monster. The book’s arrival was an electric moment, thanks to its […]

Abstract: By asserting the realities of settler coloniality in the evolution of southwestern Mindanao as a frontier space, this paper addresses a phenomenon consistently disavowed in mainstream historiographical accounts of the region. It raises three other broad concerns. First, that while resources, territory, and population are factors that figure centrally in the political economy of […]