Abstract: Water law in Australia is underpinned by the erroneous assumption of aqua nullius, the attempted extinguishment of Indigenous water laws. It’s not a situation unique to Australia as similar processes have occurred in all settler colonial states. In doing so, the state is assuming the power and authority to control and usually exploit water […]

Abstract: This essay recovers and seeks to refuse a harmful and enduring eighteenth-century fiction: settler georgic, an imperial mode that North American settlers used to foreclose refusal, naturalize British understandings of cultivation and use, and figure violent dispossession as both inevitable and in the past. Tracing this history helps to show the damage that such […]

Abstract: This dissertation traces environmental thinking about invasive species from Western-colonial, diasporic settlers of color, and Indigenous perspectives within U.S. settler colonialism. Considering environmental discourses of species invasion through the lens of settler colonialism helps us better understand how ideas about race, Indigeneity, and nature continue to shape invasion biology’s language and practices—which erase Indigeneity […]

Abstract: This dissertation argues that the significance and extent of American animal “acclimatization”—the nineteenth-century term for the purposeful introduction of non-native wild animals—has been drastically underestimated in previous historiography. Far from a negligible “fad” that only briefly interested a small number of hunters and wildlife enthusiasts, American acclimatization was in fact a large-scale and enduring […]

The October 7, 2023 attack by Hamas against Israeli targets and the subsequent assaults by Israel in Gaza have turned the world’s attention on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The more traditional news media as well as various social media sites currently overflow with reports and commentaries as we collectively attempt to understand the relations between Israelis […]

Abstract: This article examines the relationship between settler colonialism and biodiversity. Focusing on Laikipia, Kenya, we argue that the types of plant and animal species present in the landscape have been shaped by historical and present power relations and often support settler colonial projects. We introduce five modes of violent ecological transformation that have been […]

Abstract: This article critically engages with the Canadian framing of settler colonial/decolonial politics in terms of guilt and innocence. I argue that centring innocence, even as something to be snatched away from settlers, as with the theorization of settler moves to innocence, can corrupt the practice of moral responsibility. Furthermore, I argue that the desire […]

Abstract: India’s annexation of Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir in August 2019 has generated debates within Critical Kashmir Studies regarding the kind of settler colonialism that is operating in this disputed Himalayan region. To illuminate the current relationship between land dispossession and narratives that legitimize land grab (for the settlement of Hindu Indian settlers), this article […]

Description: Challenges the myth of the United States as a nation of immigrants by bringing together two groups rarely read together: Native Americans and Eastern European immigrants. In this cultural history of Americanization during the Progressive Era, Cristina Stanciu argues that new immigrants and Native Americans shaped the intellectual and cultural debates over inclusion and […]

Abstract: The Conquest of the Desert was a military campaign launched by the Argentine state (1878–1885) to remove the Indigenous peoples of the Pampas and Patagonia in order to open the region for Argentine occupation. Then Minister of War Julo A. Roca led the campaigns and subsequently became president of Argentina in 1880. Argentine state […]