Description: In present-day Japan Ainu women create spaces of cultural vitalization in which they can move between “being Ainu” through their natal and affinal relationships and actively “becoming Ainu” through their craftwork. They craft these spaces despite the specter of loss that haunts the efforts of former colonial subjects, like Ainu, to reconnect with their pasts. […]

Abstract: This article maps the in-situ affective strategies employed by Indian leaders to counter the 1901 Immigration Restriction Act, the legal cornerstone of the White Australia Policy. It explores how a masseur, Teepoo Hall, and a merchant, Khooda Bux, mobilised Indian trade networks at a time when British imperial networks were in complex tension with growing […]

Abstract: This article begins with a single, seemingly isolated moment of activism by the Indigenous residents of the Gap community in Alice Springs. We use this protest to make two arguments. First, we highlight the significance of local mobility to Indigenous people in the twentieth century; and second, we trace a hidden counter network of Indigenous […]

Abstract: This article examines state efforts to assimilate Indigenous peoples through the spatial politics of housing design and the regulation of access to and use of houses, streets, and towns. Using two Australian case studies in the 1950s, Framlingham Aboriginal Reserve in Victoria and the Gap housing development in the Northern Territory, and inspired by recent […]

Abstract: The paper sets out to develop a methodological framework for researching Indigenous political economies. This endeavor has been marked historically by more or less racist and ahistorical culturalisms. Building on recent interventions in Indigenous studies and settler colonial studies, I argue that such research must account for the ongoing history of settler-colonization and Indigenous resistance. […]

Abstract: This essay uses the interwar writing of Eleanor Dark to destabilise the binary between nationalist-realism and experimental modernism in accounts of Australian literature. Dark’s novels mix modernist and experimental styles with middlebrow and vernacular forms, while also legitimating settler nationalist desires. This constellation was not unique to Dark but was part of a broader phenomenon […]

Abstract: This articles proposes a fresh reading of the classic Canadian novel, Wild Geese, by Martha Ostenso. By way of Anna Tsing’s discussion of the cross-species influence of crops on the development of Western agricultural societies, I reconceive of the novel’s surly antagonist Caleb as beholden to the fruits of his labour. I thereby develop a reading of […]

Abstract: Schools are institutions for knowledge dissemination but at the same time also sites of power. They inculcate students into specific ideological and emotional norms and social relations. Far from being politically neutral institutions, schools disseminate government-sanctioned ways of understanding and engaging in Indigenous-settler relationships. Schooling, as a form of power, has particular salience in settler […]

Abstract: Expressions of concern about the national future, or the surfacing of history through postcolonial melancholia and nostalgia for a lost Golden Age, illustrate how temporality and tense have been absorbed into discourses, affective attachments and practices of cultural recognition and national belonging. First, this paper aims to develop the discussion of urban multiculture in human […]

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