Excerpt: This essay investigates artist and scholar Warren Cariou’s aesthetic attempts to challenge the operational logic and legitimacy of petromodernity, what Stephanie LeMenager defines as “a modern life based in the cheap energy systems long made possible by petroleum” (“Aesthetics” 60). Like all forms of modernity, petromodernity has produced numerous aesthetic responses. Methods of representing petromodernity […]

Abstract: While the Progressive Era in U.S. history featured varied examples of individuals and organizations turning to the federal government for reform and support, major narratives have mainly left American Indian tribal communities out of the story. This essay argues that Native people actually were quite active in their reservation communities during the late nineteenth and […]

Abstract: This essay analyzes the interconnected regimes of US settler colonialism and militarization in Hawai‘i by examining the expansion of public health programs under martial law during World War II. I explore the biopolitics of wartime public health programs that targeted health and hygiene practices as a means of military surveillance, territorial organization, and population […]

Abstract: This paper argues that it was environmental knowledge, which Aboriginal people held and traded, that formed the basis of the slender chances they had for survival in the changed circumstances of British settlement in Sydney. The case study is centred on the life and work of William Rowley, about whom the little evidence which exists […]

Abstract: Theobald explores the intersection of colonial and reproductive politics in the United States and contends that for Native American women, the politics of abortion cannot be disentangled from the (ongoing) history of settler colonialism. The chapter provides an overview of two different historical “moments.” At the turn of the twentieth century, as policymakers and social […]

Excerpt: Blood Meridian is a historical novel that tells story of settler colonial conquest in the borderlands of Northern Mexico in the years following the US-Mexico war of 1848. It fictionalizes the actions of a group of American scalp hunters who were paid by the Mexican state after the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo […]

Abstract: With the exception of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit people, most Canadians enjoy water security. Indigenous people are ninety times more likely than other Canadians to lack piped water. These disparities result from and maintain the colonial relationship between Canada and Indigenous peoples. As displaced people with values often in opposition to neo-liberalism, Indigenous people […]

Abstract: This essay considers fantasies of human settlement in terms of political philosophy and literature and considers writings by Martin Heidegger, J. G. Fichte, Alexis de Tocqueville, and William Faulkner. Issues of race and place are examined.

Description: Seasteads – artificial settlements on the open sea – represent a near-future chance for multiple societal restarts. Where nation states suffer from ineffectiveness and inefficiency, both politically and economically, and cannot be changed due to path-dependency and rigidity, the open sea is a clean slate. Here, we can test new ways of doing things differently. […]

Abstract: One of the first Germans to settle in the Pennsylvania colony, Francis Daniel Pastorius left behind many manuscripts detailing a rich life. Studying his manuscripts reveals much about the first German settlers and the world they inhabited, a group that has been only slightly studied. One important aspect of Pastorius’s German American life was his […]