Abstract: State and institutional actors have been shaping settler-farmer subjectivities in order to transform the landscape and thus the history and geography of the Canadian Prairies. This paper expands the application of environmentality from its origins in colonial forestry to interrogate agriculture on prairie landscapes. The Canadian state used the technologies of environmentality to influence “common […]

Abstract: In 1919, the Bolshevik Party of Russia formed the Communist International (Comintern) to lead the international communist movement. As part of its efforts, it maintained a strong commitment to supporting colonial liberation, self-determination of nations, and racial equality. Many scholars of the Comintern and the Soviet Union assume that Moscow demanded firm discipline of all […]

Abstract: This article examines interactions between Slavic peasant migrants and mobile pastoralist Kazakhs within the setting of the Kazakh Steppe during the period of heaviest resettlement to the region beginning in the late nineteenth century and continuing into the early twentieth century. It considers how the importance of horses to both settlers and Kazakhs alike dictated […]

Abstract: Using Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career as its focus, this paper explores the institutional possibilities and constraints of ‘worlding’ settler texts in secondary school and university environments. We argue that the teaching of texts, and those who teach texts in schools and universities, play a key role in negotiating national and international textual boundaries. This […]

Abstract: Ursula Bethell’s unassuming collection of poems, ‘From a Garden in the Antipodes’, depicts a literature and nation in flux through the central image of the garden. This will not be surprising to anyone who has owned a garden; they exist always in a state of transition, changing from and into. Gardening is a way of […]

Abstract: Victims of colonial, Indigenous child-removal policies have attracted public expressions of compassion from Indigenous and settler-state political leaders in Canada since the 1990s. This public compassion has fueled legal and political mechanisms, leveraging resources for standardized interventions said to “heal” these victims: cash payments, a truth-telling forum, therapy. These claims to healing provide an entry-point […]

Abstract: This article explores the legal structures and discursive framings informing the governance of one particular “backward” region of India, the Andaman Islands. I trace the shifting patterns of occupation and development of the islands in the colonial and postcolonial periods, with a focus on the changes wrought by independence in 1947 and the eventual history […]

Abstract: This dissertation contributes to debates on processes of nation building and their relationship to indigenous politics across the Canada/US border in the Pacific Northwest of North America. Specifically, I chronicle the various political, cultural, and environmental strategies taken by the Coast Salish Tribes and First Nations to overcome the obstacles presented by the Canada/US border […]

Taiwan exists in the between. In historical terms, Taiwan has existed, and continues to exist, in and between various iterations of colonial occupation: from seventeenth-century Dutch rule and the resulting Han settler colonialism to twentieth-century Japanese occupation and the current colonial occupation of the lingering Kuomintang (KMT) Nationalist government. Politically, Taiwan resides in between the […]

Abstract: This dissertation examines Irish Catholic diasporic communities in the early- to mid-nineteenth century British settler colonies of Upper Canada and New South Wales. As one of the “founding peoples” of settler Canada and Australia, Irish Catholic immigrants formed a sizeable minority group burdened by historical stereotypes on account of their religion, class, and ethnicity. Yet […]