Abstract: This thesis employs Jürgen Habermas’s discourse theory of law to argue that the doctrine of Canada’s duty to consult with indigenous communities is based on extra-legal communicative presumptions that fail to reflect the basic norm of communicative equality. It derives a set of communicative norms from discourse theory and demonstrates their dovetailing with discursive […]

Review by Mark Caprio.

From the Introduction: Circassians are an indigenous ethnic group that originates in the northwestern Caucasus Mountains. Throughout the nineteenth century, the Russian Empire enacted a policy to eradicate Circassians from their ancestral homelands, effectively pushing almost all surviving Circassians throughout the diaspora. Russia recently hosted the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, the heart of Circassian […]

Abstract: This essay examines my work as expert witness in the case of U.S. v. Michigan, a Indigenous use-rights case. I was charged with parsing the intention of a specific article of the 1836 Treaty of Washington compelling land cession by Anishinaabe peoples and with writing a history of land use in the area from […]

Abstract: Since the 19th century, Canadian culture has been rife with Mountie lore, and since the 1970s, many critics have deconstructed the Mountie myth, showing how this police force was romanticized in both non-fiction and fiction alike. This paper explores one example of such cultural mythmaking: a fictional television script about law and order involving […]

Abstract: In this article I draw on a long history of successive transatlantic “displacements” and “returns” that have shaped and reshaped Liberian diasporan identities. Proposing that diasporicity is above all an identity discourse, the first part of this article documents and compares dramatic differences in that discourse across historical generations while also examining arguments about […]

Abstract: In several of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s tales, Puritan New England becomes a metaphor for Eden. In developing this metaphor, Hawthorne expresses his desire for Utopia and laments its loss, even as he expunges his guilt for his Puritan ancestry. Several examples of Hawthorne’s writings will be used to support this position.

Abstract: This article explores how the meaning of Empire Day in the British World was manipulated and transformed through a range of urban institutions before reaching the public at large. Selecting cities in England and the Antipodean colonies for comparison, we shall challenge the assumption that a hegemonic imperial ideology was streamed uncontested and unaltered […]

Abstract: This deliberately presentist essay uses More’s Utopia to contribute to the debate over the relationship between environmentalism and postcolonialism; explore the relationship between a text’s contexts and “meaning(s)”; and illustrate how utopian thinking can expose contradictions underlying other forms of imagining better worlds. Contextualizing Utopia with two different twenty-first-century comparators, it interrogates assumptions that […]

Excerpt: Queer organizing against Israel’s deployment of gay rights discourses to mask the occupation of Palestine—referred to as “pinkwashing” within academic and activist circles—has raised pertinent questions about the relations between settler colonialism, sexuality, gender, race, and (gay) imperialism. Such campaigns have directed attention to the realities of occupation in Palestine/Israel while simultaneously obscuring the […]