Excerpt: Atlantic senior editor, Columbia University faculty member, critic and poet Adam Kirsch’s Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice (2024) is disconnected from morality and not informed by facts. To genuinely engage, I will refrain from offering a moral rejoinder and will respond in accordance with its logic. Should I remind readers that Palestinians are […]

Abstract: Of the twelve letters comprising J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters From an American Farmer (1782), the penultimate eleventh stands out. It is narrated not by the titular Farmer James but by “Iwan,” a Russian gentleman who declares America and Russia “nearer neighbours” (262). This essay recovers the unacknowledged work Russian-American neighborliness performs […]

Excerpt: What happens if we include sheep and cattle in our analysis of British settler-colonial populations during the early to mid-nineteenth century?

Abstract: This research examines the participation of a diverse group of activists in the 2016–2017 Standing Rock movement, led by Oceti Sakowin tribal members, on the borders of the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota to stop the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). The movement resisted the pipeline in the name of water […]

Abstract: In order to examine the disjuncture in responses to the Indigenous Languages Act (ILA) between different Indigenous groups, in this paper I will explore the genealogy of Indigenous language policy in Canada by examining various government and community reports, documents, as well as parliamentary and committee debates from the 1960s onwards, which is when […]

Abstract: In both the US and Canada third pillar protective legislation was largely oriented towards the promoting assimilation and solving the ‘Indian problem’. It provided a context and frame of reference for the establishment and shaping of a key component of second pillar Indigenous policy – the promotion of church-run, state-funded boarding schools (US) and […]

Abstract: This article examines how a settler-suburban imaginary organised land, labour, and legitimate possession in the Swan River Colony on Whadjuk Noongar Country, where relationships to Country precede and continue beyond colonial occupation. It traces the emergence of an ideology of landscape improvement and follows its legal and aesthetic translation through British colonial property regimes. […]

Abstract: Significant work conducted by Bentham scholars indicates that Benthamite ideas on penal reform were present in the Australian colonies. This has been demonstrated in part through discussions of a number of panoptic-inspired institutions across Australia. Despite this, there have been fewer debates on why the panopticon became a favoured tool for punishment in colonial […]

Abstract: This Traveller-led paper examines how settlement became the dominant institutional and cultural standard in Ireland. It distinguishes Gaelic habitation from colonial settlement and the later administrative division between Travellers and a settled majority. Drawing on historical documents, legislation, government reports and Traveller testimony, I examine changes in landholding, livelihood, schooling and public authority. Native […]

Description: Disjunctures: Indigenous Redirections in Political Theory offers a critical, comparative engagement with North American Indigenous and dominant Euro-modern political traditions, and explores the irreconcilable differences between them. These differences disclose political options that cannot be pursued simultaneously or, in a word, disjunctures. For contemporary political societies committed to reconciliation, choices will have to be […]