Abstract: This article seeks to reorient the space race and especially the 1969 Apollo 11 mission within Civil Rights, Black, and Native American Movements’ resistance to an oppressive U.S. state. In contextualizing the space race as part of a Cold War contest between the United States and the ongoing threat of the Soviet Union, I […]

Abstract: This article provides a new look at conducting family history research from the perspective of historical materialism (Marxism). Instead of typical family histories isolating and atomizing the individual and family oral accounts which center the “great man” of the past, this work provides an analysis firmly rooted in class conflict and how individuals directly […]

Abstract: This paper draws on the critical negativity presented by Julia Kristeva and Édouard Glissant. Despite their differences, both accounts agree on three points: First, they respectively reject the fixation of an original meaning or original identity, moving towards a more indeterminate open-ended rethinking of loss, trauma, and the fragmented subject. Like Glissant’s ‘womb abyss’, […]

Abstract: This chapter explores how the Coen brothers reconfigure the Western in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, laying bare its white settler fantasies to reveal how toxic beliefs often shape foundational myths of regional and national identity. Many of the sequences refuse to deliver action in ways we expect in the genre. Plots, for instance, often […]

Abstract: This chapter argues that the television series Yellowstone rewrites the history of white settlement and white relations with Native nations in Montana, revising a cultural idea of the “Frontier” that promotes a notion of “rugged individualism,” a ranching-style monopoly capitalism, and an ethically empty “environmental” ethos. It is a narrative adaptation of a story of the […]

Abstract: This article examines how Māori indigeneity is ethically reconfigured in diaspora when Māori live on Aboriginal land in so-called Australia. Drawing on tikanga-based obligations of manuhiritanga, it argues that Māori are tangata whenua in Aotearoa New Zealand but become implicated in settler/invader relations in Australia unless they practice humility, restraint, and accountability to local […]

Abstract: This chapter briefly compares the nature of ranching and pastoralism. It then follows the diffusion of cattle ranching to the Americas, Oceania, and southern Africa. And it explores how ranching helped propel settler colonialism. However, rather than viewing cattle as the “shock troops” of European settlement, it describes ranching as the handmaiden of state-led […]

Abstract: This article examines why Indigenous land titling, widely promoted as an enabling condition for climate action, advances without closing persistent gaps in territorial recognition. It conceptualizes this paradox as a climate titling institutional trap, in which reforms progress through adaptive practices yet remain embedded in territorial governance configurations that constrain their transformative potential. Drawing on […]

Abstract: Over the past decade, Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu has become a flashpoint in Australia’s ongoing History Wars. By challenging colonial myths that depicted Aboriginal peoples as ‘mere hunter-gatherers’ and demonstrating the complexity of pre-colonial practices of cultivation and land management, Pascoe directly unsettled the legal fiction of terra nullius and, with it, the legitimacy of the settler-colonial nation-state. […]

Abstract: A widely shared assumption is that truth-telling about colonial violence can facilitate reconciliation between settlers and Indigenous peoples. This paper addresses the psychological disposition of the settlers of Australia as it was manifested in recent public contestations, including in the lead-up to the Voice referendum of October 2023, when the proposal of amending the […]