Abstract: This study explores the challenges of land tenure reform for three former settler colonies in southern Africa–Zimbabwe, Namibia, and South Africa. While land redistribution programmes have been the primary focus of land reform for these countries since independence, land tenure reform for the inhabitants of communal areas is an equally important and complex policy […]

Abstract: Adding to a growing body of scholarship on Chicanafuturism and borderlands science fiction, this essay interrogates the politics of labor in Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita’s novella Lunar Braceros 2125-2148. It examines the breakdown of the heteronormative nuclear family and its transformation into another version of the nuclear family, one that results from radioactive […]

Abstract: Over the last century, the United States Forest Service (USFS) has reversed its stance on the ecological role of fire – from a militant enforcer of forest fire suppression to supporting prescribed fire as a management tool. Meanwhile, the Karuk Tribe has always prioritized cultural burning as a vital spiritual and ecological practice, one […]

Abstract: This article examines the intertwined cultural politics of geology, mining, and archival media in the context of Japan’s development as an archipelagic empire. The first Japanese geological map (1876) was completed by American geologist Benjamin Smith Lyman, who surveyed mineral deposits in Hokkaidō, Japan’s northern island, long inhabited by the Indigenous Ainu people. Following […]

Abstract: This article examines settler-colonial visuality in West Bank Jewish-Israeli settlements. It argues that settler visuality is attuned to a bourgeois ideal of domestic life, made possible by practices of unseeing. Reading Israeli encounters with the Wall and other artifacts of the occupation, I show that these visual encounters help settlers position themselves politically within Israel—and […]

Abstract: This article examines how children draw on local sources of morality and moral worth to forge connections, build friendship and enforce distinctions across difference in a rural multicultural city of settler Australia. Children’s friendship-making practices across ethnic and class differences have been widely explored in urban Australia. Far less is known about how children […]

Abstract: This article engages a form of cosmopolitanism that departs from universalist precepts, and instead underscores the role of situated difference in establishing productive dialogues among particular world views. It also works with the associated concept of the cosmopolitan stranger to delineate relationships among othered groups. Reading encounters between strangers in George Elliott Clarke’s 2016 […]

Abstract: Through a close reading of Joe Sacco’s Paying the Land (2020), a graphic novel about the struggle of the Dene people in Canada’s Northwestern territories, this article shows how Sacco effects a “peripheral realism” that draws the systemic continuities of different phases of colonial modernity into view. The article then describes Sacco’s “terrestrial realism,” […]

Abstract: What does the story of European domination of the land and peoples of the “new world” tell us about the ideals and the realities of American political development? A republic founded on the high ideals of equality, fairness, and liberty was also a nation build on violence and racism. How did these “two countries” […]

Abstract: Nisga’a writer Jordan Abel created Un/inhabited by rearranging and deleting large swathes of ninety-one western novels. Unsurprisingly, then, this poem is largely interpreted as an invitation to readers to join Abel in critically examining the colonial mindset underpinning the western genre. While this alone makes the poem a valuable resource in literary studies classrooms, I look […]