Abstract: My project articulates and examines the notion of a settler-colonial structure of feeling through visual analysis of landscape in Australian film, art and popular culture from post-World War II to the present day. The focus of such an investigation is not the overt intentions of representations of landscape, but rather the unrepresentable tensions they […]

Excerpt: This thesis shall investigate the problematics of settler colonialism through the prism of three key literary fictions of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in particular: Daniel Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe (1719), Jacques Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s novel Paul et Virginie (Paul and Virginia, 1780) and Heinrich von Kleist’s novella Die Verlobung in St. […]

Excerpt: While the turn towards analyzing ongoing settler-colonialism has finally reached the mainstream of North American political discussions, there is still a lack of popular understanding of the issues involved. Settler-colonialism is, ironically, understood within the framework of the ways of thinking brought by the European ruling classes to the Americas. By extension, the conceptions […]

Abstract: The fields of Border Studies and Critical Indigenous Studies offer much to social scientists seeking to understand the operation of power in the lives of borderlands communities. This article illustrates why critical Indigenous scholarship should be a necessary framework in exploring issues of state and nation-building by examining four possible origin stories for what […]

Abstract: This dissertation examines the child death inquiry as a performative ritual of liberaldemocratic governance in the contexts of ongoing settler colonialism and the implementation of New Public Management in Canadian public policy. I ask: what is the performative work of public inquiries in constituting political relationships in contemporary Canada? I situate the child death […]

Abstract: Russia’s conquest of the northern shores of the Black Sea in the late eighteenth century and their renaming as ‘New Russia’ contributed to a wider movement of colonisation, settlement, and re-signification of territories worldwide under the aegis of imperial ideology. The adoption of the new name was also a way to erase the memory […]

Abstract: This article explores the entanglements of settler colonialism with the integration of the 20th century-built environment onto the UNESCO World Heritage List by focusing on architectural preservation in Brasilia. The addition of Brasilia to the World Heritage List in 1987 was the realisation of a longstanding effort to enhance institutional legitimacy by expanding the […]

Abstract: The modern historiography of Oregon’s settler colonization distances itself radically from the euphemistic accounts that were common into the mid-twentieth century. Some assumptions, however, are rarely challenged. In his article, author Julius Wilm addresses three areas where local agency continues to be overemphasized in modern historiography at the expense of national forces or it […]

Abstract: This chapter explores the four key areas of difference between Ethnic Studies and Area Studies on the one hand and Jewish Studies and Israel Studies on the other as each set of fields relates to (1) nourishing ethnic pride, (2) advocacy and cultivating allies, (3) relationship to Europe, whiteness, colonialism, and the West, and (4) prescriptivist messaging. Familiarity with […]

Abstract: In his Indigenous critique of the field of animal studies, Billy-Ray Belcourt (Driftpile Cree Nation) describes it as having an analytic blind spot when it comes to settler-colonialism, a blind spot that manifests through universalising claims and clumsy arguments about ‘shared’ oppressions, through assumptions that settler colonial political institutions can be a neutral part […]