Excerpt: This work appraises settler-colonial Australia’s strategic contribution to the transnational political traditions of what James Belich (2009) seminally called the global ‘settler revolution’. Specifically, this paper discusses settler Australia’s self-appointed role as sociopolitical ‘laboratory’ during the early decades of the twentieth century, after the settler revolution had entered a period of crisis elsewhere. The […]

Abstract: Memorialisation in settler-colonial nations such as Australia is intensely political. It creates public symbols of people and events those in authority consider important and worthy of remembrance. Counternarratives of various marginalised others are silenced through processes of collective forgetting. In Australia, this forgetting has meant that colonial histories of exploration and discovery have been […]

Abstract: This chapter examines the relationship between oil and the hard-boiled mode in Cherokee author Thomas King’s Cold Skies (2018). Uniting the fields of crime fiction and petrocriticism, the chapter first traces how the hard-boiled developed alongside twentieth-century American petromobility. It then analyses how King uses hard-boiled conventions to make legible how oil is both […]

Abstract: This article re-evaluates the historical research on the carnivalesque rituals that arrived in Van Diemen’s Land (VDL) with British convicts, their colonial minders and free settlers. The revaluation deploys more theoretically informed understandings of carnivalesque ritual (using Bakhtin, Zemon Davis, le Roy Ladurie, Bristol, Underdown, Durston and others), coupled with more recent historical understandings […]

Abstract: This article challenges the fourth ally thesis, which argues that Great Britain was a crucial actor underpinning the combined forces of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay that defeated Paraguay in the 1864–70 War of the Triple Alliance. To date, the debate has focused on British involvement in the genesis and financing of the allied war […]

Abstract: Focusing on the case of Canada, this paper offers an investigation of how members of Indigenous nations perceive the system of government using data from the 2019 Canadian Election Study (CES). Given the legacies of colonialism, we consider if Indigenous individuals in Canada adopt a distinct outlook on political institutions, actors, and democracy when compared to […]

Description: In Settler Aesthetics, an analysis of renowned director Terrence Malick’s 2005 film, The New World, Mishuana Goeman examines the continuity of imperialist exceptionalism and settler-colonial aesthetics. The story of Pocahontas has thrived for centuries as a cover for settler-colonial erasure, destruction, and violence against Native peoples, and Native women in particular. Since the romanticized story of […]

Excerpt: On 18 March 2022, a South African judge delivered an unprecedented judgement: “the fundamental rights of First Nations Peoples” were insufficiently considered in the context of a multi billion-rand property development in Cape Town …

Abstract: In 1925, one of the first infant welfare clinics to specifically serve Arab children in Palestine opened in the city of Ramallah. This article examines how that institution brought together various political ideologies that used the Palestinian child’s body as a vehicle for a modern future. The clinic targeted poor children and mothers in […]

Description: The concept of settler colonialism offers an invaluable lens to reframe early westerns and travel pictures as re-enactments of the United States’ repressed past. Westerns in particular propose a remarkable vision of white settlers’ westward expansion that reveals a transformation in what “American Progress” came to mean. Initially, these films tracked settlers moving westward […]