Abstract: Countries with a superdiverse population due to increases in migration have been slow in recognising and addressing social inequalities driven by this situation (Vertovec, 2007). In Aotearoa (New Zealand), there are now more than 200 different ethnic groups and 27.4% of its population was born overseas (Statistics New Zealand, 2019), and there is also an increasing […]

Abstract:This article explores the role played by savagism in American historical consciousness, focusing on its appearance in settler accounts of the Battle of Wyoming (1778) of the Revolutionary War. The story of Wyoming is told each year in the small town of Wyoming, Pennsylvania in one of the longest-running historical commemorations in the United States. […]

Abstract: This paper considers two remarkable efforts to counter the repressive effects of ‘colonial cartography’: the Nakba map project in Israel, and the Ta’n Weji-sqalia’tiek Mi’kmaw Place Names Digital Atlas and Website Project in Mi’kma’ki (Nova Scotia, Canada). Undertaken by the Israeli NGO Zochrot (‘remembering’ in Hebrew), the Nakba ‘counter-mapping’ project seeks to challenge settler foundation myths […]

Abstract: Toni Morrison’s 2012 novel Home is concerned primarily with the efforts undertaken by its protagonist, the black Korean War veteran Frank Money, to accommodate himself to civilian life. However, Home differs from other Korean War novels in that after Frank returns to the United States, he neither aligns his wartime experiences with the superpower rivalry nor conducts a […]

Excerpt: For some decades now, Israeli propaganda (or hasbara) has managed to keep in play two quite contradictory self-descriptions that serve at once to obscure and to legitimate its ongoing subjugation of Palestinians through occupation, strangulating siege, dispossession and settlement, discrimination and collective punishment, not to mention its regular use of lethal force. Though each and […]

Abstract: This article examines Susanna Moodie’s memoirs in the context of changing narratives around immigration and social class in the 1830s. She overtly engaged with the age’s boosterist literature, warning genteel Britons about unrealistic portrayals of emigration, and positioning herself as an authentic interpreter of colonial realities. Moodie’s texts dramatize the settler-colonial dilemma of early […]

Abstract: Between 1500 and 1700 English and Algonquians in New England possessed different spatial epistemologies that caused them to experience and describe the landscape in distinct ways. For example, where colonists saw a dangerous swamp, Algonquians saw a productive landscape with spiritual significance that served as a haven in times of war. This dissertation argues […]

Abstract: This paper contends that unfree Indigenous student labour at residential schools was a key—and underappreciated—component of settler colonialism in Canada. Colonial administration and the churches attempted to “civilize” and assimilate Indigenous people—and prepare the frontier for white settlers—through residential schooling. Labour, in accordance with Euro‐Canadian gender norms, was expected to usher Brandon Industrial Institute […]

Excerpt: We all want to think well of ourselves. This truism applies to societies as well as to their individual citizens. In the United States, belief in American exceptionalism has sometimes produced outlandish assertions, as when the US solicitor general, in blithe disregard of centuries of slavery and the annihilation of Indian tribes, proclaimed in […]

Excerpt: In settler societies, coming to grips with historical wrongs continues to pose an enduring dilemma. Powerful scripts and events of redress, forgiveness and reconciliation are used to petition for and engage with narratives of the “post” settler nation state. The scope, substance, and politics of reckoning with settler colonial wrongs have garnered an intense […]