Abstract: This paper examines how Southern Andean Patagonia has been increasingly incorporated within networks of global capital since the 1990s. Once defined by military violence against indigenous societies, white settler colonialism, and livestock farming, this remote region has become an iconic center for green development in Latin America. This article develops the argument that a regional […]

Abstract: This article analyses how settlers of the Falkland Islands (Malvinas) construct themselves as ‘natives’ through environmental management. Taking a multispecies ethnographic and historical approach to studying the Falkland Islanders’ self-determination claim, I explore a series of ecological practices that demonstrate how some nonhumans become institutionalized into systems of racial and colonial classification whereas others appear […]

Abstract: This article challenges the dominant historical paradigms used to analyze imperial plant and animal transfers by examining the role of fodder crops in early colonial development in New South Wales and the Cape of Good Hope. In Alfred Crosby’s enduring formulation of ecological imperialism—that is, the ecological transformation of temperate colonies of settlement by European […]

Abstract: In this article I assume that denial is particularly marked in settler societies since their very foundations lie in the dispossession, destruction and displacement of aboriginal peoples and they have never experienced any event like those that have forced other nations to repudiate the oppressive discourses that lie at their heart. Examining the case of […]

Abstract: Sharlot Hall was an author, poet, historian, booster, ranch woman, presidential elector, clubwoman, and development advocate for the territory and subsequently state of Arizona at the turn of the twentieth century. As an influential public figure regionally and nationally, she helped to shape a collective understanding of Arizona’s geography, past, and its future potential. Examined […]

Excerpt: Released in 1961, The Exiles follows a day in the life of a group of Indigenous migrants—Yvonne, the lead, Homer, her onscreen partner, and their friends Mary, Claudine, Cliff, and Tommy—as they drink, shop, sing, fight, and wander the spaces of Yaanga, the Gabrielino-Tongva village which is currently occupied by downtown Los Angeles. The Exiles […]

Excerpt: Sensing the deficiency, writers and artists born into a region made prosperous through settlement would seek a more authentic relation to place. Some were apt to find it in a return to primary dramas of discovery and settlement, revisiting them, as it were, in a manner that could be at once critical and compensatory, as […]

Excerpt: The issue becomes, then, not just guilt for the past crimes against the Indians but the continued guilt produced by not representing the Indians’ perspective on events and the reasons for their violence. […] this statement […] sums up the deep ambivalence of his book, which both shows settlers as heroes battling Indians and, in […]

Excerpt: The field of western American literary studies emerged in the 1960s and ’70s as a regionalist critique that imagined a western ethics of place against the Turnerian consensus that then dominated American studies. Working in tandem with historical critiques that were recasting the frontier as a site of imperial, patriarchal, and ecological violence, the critique […]

Description: Whether in the form of warfare, dispossession, forced migration, or social prejudice, Australia’s sense of nationhood was born from—and continues to be defined by—experiences of violence. Legacies of Violence probes this brutal legacy through case studies that range from the colonial frontier to modern domestic spaces, exploring themes of empathy, isolation, and Australians’ imagined place […]