Excerpt: First, instead of the usual focus on subaltern subjects, I attend to the production of the empire’s universal self – the West in the figure of the researcher and the Japanese empire – through logics that are enabled by the doubled erasure of indigenous Ainu bodies. Next, I locate the moments of Ainu hyper-visibility […]

Abstract: This paper explores the applicability of the term genocide to Australian colonisation, and considers whether the scholar Patrick Wolfe’s concept of settler colonialism’s inherent “logic of elimination” provides a more useful framework for considering Australian history.

Description: This book offers a new interpretation of political reform in the settler colonies of Britain’s empire in the early nineteenth century. It examines the influence of Scottish Presbyterian dissenting churches and their political values. It re-evaluates five notorious Scottish reformers and unpacks the Presbyterian foundation to their political ideas: Thomas Pringle (1789-1834), a poet in Cape Town; Thomas McCulloch (1776-1843), an educator in Pictou; John Dunmore Lang (1799-1878), a church minister in […]

Abstract: Using the Flint, Michigan water crisis as a backdrop, this review piece explores the concept of white innocence. The concept of white innocence presents us with an analytic tool to understand the frustrating endurance of white supremacy within the U.S. settler state and how white supremacy operates through a range of geographically grounded practices. This […]

Abstract: Thomas Hobbes was the first major thinker to locate an imagined pre-political State of Nature in the Americas. Even his critics such as Locke and Rousseau followed him in seeing native Americans as living in a world which they imagined existed in pre-historic Europe and, most importantly, beyond meaningful dialogue. These and other thinkers used America as a […]

Description: A gift from the Creator – that is where it all began. The game of lacrosse has been a central element of many Indigenous cultures for centuries, but once non-Indigenous players entered the sport, it became a site of appropriation – then reclamation – of Indigenous identities. Focusing on the history of lacrosse in Indigenous […]

Abstract: American Christian pilgrimage to the Holy Land started within a historical and ideological context shaped by American territorial expansionism. The settler-colonial impulses informing that expansionism were carried to Palestine, where Palestinians were encountered as “savages” compared explicitly to American Indians. Erasure of the Holy Land’s Indigenous inhabitants is thus sanctioned. Herman Melville’s Clarel and Mark […]

Abstract: During the twentieth century some Australian states and the U.S. federal government enacted comparable policies that demonstrate how the discourse of protection continued to survive in an era when settler nations were focussed on “assimilating” Indigenous populations. The Australian policy of exemption and the U.S. policy of competency did not represent a true change in […]

Abstract: This article considers how shifting programs of Aboriginal protection in nineteenth-century Australia responded to Indigenous mobility as a problem of colonial governance and how they contributed over time to creating an emergent discourse of the Aboriginal “vagrant.” There has been surprisingly little attention to how the legal charge of vagrancy became applied to Indigenous people […]

Abstract: Sydney, Australia, is rarely seen as an Indigenous place, yet over 52,000 Indigenous people live here. “Indigeneity” persists in educational discourse as a remote phenomenon, but the research reveals otherwise for many Indigenous people who continue to live in Sydney. This is reflected in the contemporary lives of seven Dharug women who constitute the basis […]