Abstract: Female political activism and economic engagement in the Australian colonies are usually located within the last decades of the nineteenth century, yet a reexamination of the 1850s reveals that the twin issues of women’s political rights and activities within the public sphere were raised much earlier. This article shows that as the Australian colonies […]

Description: Planetary spaces such as the poles, the oceans, the atmosphere, and subterranean regions captured the British imperial imagination. Intangible, inhospitable, or inaccessible, these blank spaces existed beyond the boundaries of known and inhabited places. Siobhan Carroll interrogates the role these blank spaces played in the construction of British identity during an era of unsettling […]

Abstract: This essay examines the concept of “Indian nullification” in the political writings of William Apess by situating his defense of native self-determination in the context of debates about the legitimacy of nullification in U.S. constitutionalism. It illustrates how Indian nullification operates, not as a feature of constitutional design asserting minority rights over the tyranny […]

Abstract: Historically, studies of Indigenous menstrual practices were mired in assumptions that these practices were oppressive toward women. The high regard for menstruation as demonstrated through Indigenous women’s coming of age ceremonies and the continuing rituals of menstruation among Indigenous peoples has not been critically engaged with, and is often relegated to dismissive and oversimplified […]

Excerpt: In 2011, San Francisco’s Contemporary Jewish Museum curated an exhibit called California Dreaming: Jewish Life in the Bay Area from the Gold Rush to the Present. The ambitious exhibit illustrated the specific regional history of San Francisco’s Jewish community. Arranged chronologically, most of the exhibit focused on the successes of Jewish families in San […]

Abstract: The 1970s witnessed the emergence of a protest-based environmental movement in Australia. We outline here the history of the unstable meeting of environmentalism and Aboriginal interests, before turning to Marcia Langton’s recent critique of the progressive ‘green left’ in Australia.1 We summarise Langton’s argument: environmentalists would deny Aboriginal groups the benefits that flow from […]

Abstract: We argue that understanding contemporary geographies of race and militarism is predicated on understandings of settler colonialism and white supremacy. Settler colonialism is a continuously unfolding project of empire that is enabled by and through specific racial configurations that are tied to geographies of white supremacy. In a U.S. context, settler colonialism begins with […]

Abstract: This article introduces a method for analyzing Indigenous erasure in popular film that focuses not on the representations (or lack thereof) of Indigenous peoples but on representations of settlement. Whereas much of the scholarship on Native representations in film has been concerned with Hollywood’s promulgation of the “mythical Indian,” I argue that a focus […]

Abstract: Italy’s colonial expansion is an interesting case study within the settler colonial world. Although discontinuous, settlement was always present as a founding element of its colonial discourse and practice. In Libya – more than in other Italian colonies like little and sparsely populated Eritrea and Somalia, or the short-lived ‘Empire’ of Ethiopia – the […]

Abstract: This article is focuses on transracial Indigenous adoption, or what has come to be known in the Canadian context as the ‘Sixties Scoop’ or the ‘Canada scoop’, and its devastating effects on survivors’ lives. While there is some acknowledgement of the sheer number of forced Indigenous transracial adoptions in Canada in the twentieth century, […]