Description: The revolutionary Ohio Valley is often depicted as a chaotic Hobbesian dystopia, in which Indians and colonists slaughtered each other at every turn. In Unsettling the West, Rob Harper overturns this familiar story. Rather than flailing in a morass, the peoples of the revolutionary Ohio Valley actively and persistently sought to establish a new political […]

Abstract: This article argues for a reading of biopolitics as a mechanism of political empowerment under conditions in which the state perpetuates exclusion by paradoxically affirming the political equality of marginalized individuals or groups. After differentiating Michel Foucault’s conceptualization of biopolitics from its conventional interpretation in Giorgio Agamben, I show how the Canadian state counterintuitively perpetuates […]

Excerpt: My mother was affirming what we grew up knowing with absolute certainty about the United States: It was founded as a settler colonial state that, like Israel, sought (but failed) to erase the existence of Indigenous communities, and consolidated this settler colonial project by first kidnapping and enslaving Africans, and institutionalizing racist discrimination. In our […]

Abstract: This paper suggests a methodological intersection of cultural geography and settler colonial criticism to critique and reflect on the Han settler colonial structure in Taiwan by examining two representative but rarely studied propaganda films madeat the inception of the Nationalist rule in the 1950s, Bai Ke’s Descendantsof the Yellow Emperor(1955) and Chen Wen-chuan’s Beautiful Treasure […]

Abstract: The universal discourse of the Anthropocene presents a global choice that establishes environmental collapse as the problem of the future. Yet in its desire for a green future, the threat of collapse forecloses the future as a site for creatively reimagining the social relations that led to the Anthropocene. Instead of examining structures like colonialism, […]

Excerpt: Those Native peoples who were able to remain behind in the Midwest have done so either without reservations or with reservations that are generally much smaller than their Western counterparts. They have also done so while maintaining smaller populations amid a more thorough pattern of colonizer settlement. And so during the past 200 years, Indigenous […]

Description: The mid-nineteenth-century gold rushes bring to mind raucous mining camps and slapped-together cities populated by carousing miners, gamblers, and prostitutes. Yet many of the white men who went to the gold fields were products of the Victorian era: educated men who valued morality and order. Examining the closely linked gold rushes in California and British […]

Description: Land settlement schemes, sponsored by national governments and businesses, such as the Ford Corporation and the Hudson’s Bay Company, took place in locations as diverse as the Canadian Prairies, the Dutch polders, and the Amazonian rainforests. This novel contribution evaluates a diverse range of these initiatives. By 1900, any land that remained available for agricultural […]

Abstract: Much contemporary science fiction urges us to focus on eco-activism and sustainable futures in order to prevent environmental catastrophe. From a critical Indigenous and anticolonial perspective, however, the question becomes “for whom are these futures sustainable”? Set in a nondescript desert dystopia, George Miller’s film Mad Max: Fury Road 2015 alludes to the westerns of […]

Abstract: Critical scholarship on the carceral reifies two main pillars of critical thought—phenomenology and governmentality. In this study of shifting carceral logics and experiences concerning Indigenous peoples in Canada, we borrow from these traditions and also challenge their centrality in prison studies. We argue that the prison is the new reserve, and use that argument as […]