Description: This edited collection presents perspectives from a range of disciplines on the challenges of dismantling coloniality in settler societies. Showcasing a variety of pedagogies and case studies, the book offers approaches to the praxis of decolonisation in diverse settings including tertiary education, activism, arts curatorial practice, the media, trans-Indigeneity, and psychosocial therapy. Chapters centre on the personal, relational, and political work needed to support decolonisation in settler societies in Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, the United States, and Canada. Drawing from experiences in the field, contributors argue that to decolonise research and build authentic relationships with Indigenous communities, settler researchers must learn from Indigenous worldviews without appropriating them, disrupt colonial epistemologies, and reconcile their place in colonialism. Indigenising is discussed as a counterpart to the decolonisation process, involving restoring and centring the Indigenous voice within Indigenised socio-cultural, economic, legal, and political structures and institutions, including the return of land. The book is a rich resource for researchers seeking to understand and support decolonisation in settler societies, and will appeal to non-Indigenous scholars, students, and those involved in decolonisation work in community and institutional settings.

Excerpts: While investigations of the effects of colonization on Indigenous peoples at first contact in what is now known as the United States are numerous, most are focused on European white men as primary actors. With only a few exceptions, scholars have mostly ignored the unique roles of European white women. Most existing investigations exhibit anti‑Indigenous assumptions, adhere to the global north’s oppressive norms of research, or are passively voiced and apologist in tone, excusing white women from accountability as they center white people’s accounts instead of Native perspectives. None of them address the complicity of white women in what I and others argue was the attempted genocide of Native Americans.

This chapter starts from the position that feminists hoping to mount a meaningful challenge to white supremacy and heteropatriarchy must acknowledge the role feminism plays in legitimating the ongoing project of settler colonialism. Settler colonialism refers to the persistent structures of domination through which a group of invasive colonizers come to stay, claiming Indigenous lands as their own by displacing, eradicating, or subjugating Indigenous populations and asserting supreme and exclusive authority over the territory. It is important to note that settler colonialism is not a singular event that took place in the distant past, but rather a process that is continually perpetuated through the narratives and the political and legal institutions imposed by the colonizers. The goal of this chapter is to frame and generate meaningful dialogue about the complicity of feminism in upholding settler colonialism, and the possibilities for a just path forward.

Abstract: In 1898 Georges Proust, his wife Berthe and their three sons, arrived in Noumea from Bordeaux, France. They were among the free settlers who became known as ‘colons Feillet’. They took up a concession to grow coffee in the Amoa Valley along with others who arrived in 1898. Life as a colonist was difficult, arising from social isolation, environmental conditions, and lack of agricultural experience. After two years the Proust family left New Caledonia for Australia. In the new century they became part of the French community in Sydney, where Georges worked for ‘Le Courrier Australien’. In this article I describe the family’s experiences based on the account written by Alfred Proust in 1978. Their experience as settler-colonists in turn-of-the-century New Caledonia provides insights into the history of this failed experiment.

Hagar Kotef, The Colonizing Self: Or, Home and Homelessness in Israel/Palestine (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020).
Adam Shatz, The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon (London: Head of Zeus, 2024).
Mahmood Mamdani, Neither Settler Nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities (Cambridge and London: Belknap Press, 2020).
Jonny Steinberg, Winnie & Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage (London: William Collins, 2023).

Excerpt: In her book The Colonizing Self, Israeli political theorist Hagar Kotef recalls overhearing a conversation at a café in a bourgeois left-leaning neighbourhood of northern Tel Aviv in 2012. The Israeli army had been engaged in a war on Gaza at the time that killed over 150 Palestinians and displaced hundreds of families. She describes two people sitting at separate tables who end up sharing a newspaper and a conversation. At some point they conclude, in her paraphrase, that ‘if the world blames us for committing crimes against humanity in Gaza we might as well commit genocide and get it all over with’ (182). Kotef notes that they did not seem to know one another until their chance encounter in the café, as if to underscore the banality of Israeli genocidal intent vis-à-vis Palestinians such that it could furnish the shared ground for imagined community between strangers.

Abstract: What were the pedagogical forces that were operating in the construction of my racialized subject positions with the context of the Australian white settler state? In this chapter, I attempt to answer this question by deploying critical race-decolonizing theories to trace a genealogy of forces that were operative in the constitution of my subjectivity. In the first instance, I proceed to unravel a genealogy that preceded my family’s migration to the Australian colony. I work to reconstruct this genealogy to materialize the prior forces of settler colonialism and race that already inscribed me as a subject and which were instrumental as push factors in my family’s migration. I then proceed to unpack the racialized pedagogy of the white settler state that I was compelled to experience as a non-Anglo diasporic-settler child. My personal account is located in the practice of critical race theorists, who use storytelling and counter-storytelling through personal stories as a critical method to recount experiences with racism. By examining two school textbooks that were part of my miseducation, I trace how these texts pedagogically laboured to inculcate a range of hegemonic values that normalized the racialized version of the settler state.

Abstract: This discussion article argues that contestations about antisemitism in current German public discourse and an uncompromising and institutionally mandated support for Israel, even in the face of plausibly genocidal actions, are related to and enabled by an unreconstructed embrace of a settler colonialist ethos. In this context, an unwillingness to come to terms with a history of colonial violence is only one component among multiple determining factors. And yet the question of settler colonialism, while not immediately recognisable, should be recovered and foregrounded to explain the operation of what is here defined as an anti-antisemitic complex, where institutions, the media, and the law combine to enforce a ban on discussions of Israeli history and policies towards Palestinians.

Abstract: This dissertation explores an aspect of existence that is often taken for granted or dismissed as mundane: land. Its four substantive chapters trace the way different conceptualizations of land underwrote and articulated with two ideals in nineteenth-century American political thought: sovereignty (chapters 1 and 2) and freedom (chapters 3 and 4). The first chapter analyzes the treaty-making activity and official correspondence of one of Thomas Jefferson’s frontier emissaries, a young William Henry Harrison. It shows how a specific logic of sovereignty, termed “benevolent dominion,” structured settler-Indigenous relations on the colonial border and was predicated on a unique configuration of land as “terrain,” or a landscape with rigidly hierarchal borders, a unidirectional temporality, and promoting specific, “fetishized” land uses. The second chapter takes up the matter of land and sovereignty from the perspective of one of the tribes Harrison dispossessed. Life of Black Hawk (1833) is an autobiography dictated by the Sauk warrior, Mà-ka-tai-me-she-kià-kiàk or Black Hawk, that lays out a logic of sovereignty as “interdependence” and a notion of land as the source of all biological and cultural life. According to Black Hawk, “land cannot be sold” because intratribal cooperation and intertribal reciprocity, not exclusive possession, is the appropriate mode of relating to land. The third chapter pivots from sovereignty to freedom and jumps forward in time to 1852: the year a homestead bill first gained real traction in Congress. Rebutting standard “negative liberty” defenses of private property, this chapter shows how homestead advocates in the House of Representatives believed a grant of empty, vast, and abundant land could liberate urban laborers from structural domination and the social resentments that undermined moral autonomy, as well as assuage a palpable male panic by reinforcing patriarchal families. The fourth chapter reexamines homesteading, land, and freedom through the children’s novels of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Although the novels tend to reify patriarchal and settler-colonial ideologies, Wilder’s prairie settings provide the literal space for her protagonist to experiment with “reflexive” freedoms: seeing and being differently on enveloping, peripheral, and “queer” landscapes. The concluding chapter briefly brings these nineteenth-century theories to bear on the land politics of the twenty-first century.

Abstract: My dissertation, “Coastal Feelings: Colonizing Affects in Nineteenth-Century Australia,” produces an affective account of settler colonialism in the context of Australia’s coastal environments. In nineteenth-century Australia, coasts were the first environments to be seen, then settled, by invading British colonists. They remained places not only of encounter but also of connections to England, and were central to the nostalgia and violence of the settler imaginary. Coasts provided settlers with a site for defining themselves against Indigenous peoples, for imagining their new home, and for mourning the home they left behind. I argue for the centrality of affect to the settler colonial project by focusing on textual and visual depictions of coastal environments in nineteenth-century Australia. I find that gender is central to many of these accounts, which coalesce around real and fictional White women. The four chapters of my dissertation take me to four places along the southern Australian coast. Each is an example of a different kind of geographically-inflected discourse. Whether about the shore, islands, a coastal classroom, or a seemingly tranquil bay, each chapter shows how literature captures and creates affective relationships with coastal environments. It is my hope that by naming and understanding the violent colonial imperatives shaping the history of literary coasts we will be able to reexamine our contemporary relationships with coastal environments and reorient them toward justice, inclusion, and ethical littoral living.

Abstract: Plains Bison once had the largest population and range of any terrestrial herbivore in North America. Bison now occupy less than 2% of their historic range, mostly behind fences of state-run and private organizations. In 2014, Indigenous groups across North America signed The Buffalo Treaty, calling for bison rewilding. This paper examines barriers to rewilding on Canada’s prairies in the provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta. Through interviews we asked government and NGO representatives what prevents bison reintroduction and rewilding. Our results suggest that the main barriers are social acceptance and material resources. These findings support previous research in the United States and Europe and provides a foundation for future research that could include other actors, such as landowners, Indigenous organizations, and industry representatives.

Abstract: The latest historiographical trends are revealing how the end of colonialism has influenced the political and social configuration of former metropolitan centres. In particular, the return of former colonial settlers has raised a series of issues that have resonated in European political debates and societies. In Italy, these processes were shaped by a peculiar decolonization process, coinciding with the equally tortuous transition from fascism to the Republic. Drawing on recent historiography on the return of colonial settlers, and expanding the chronological span and methodological scope of previous works through original archival sources, my intervention aims to reconstruct how imperial nostalgia became a political resource exploited by both repatriate associations and conservative political factions. Although similar to contemporaneous cases, in Italy colonial commemorative practices had peculiarities linked to the role of Catholicism and to the fact that far right and even neo-fascist movements exploited the demands of repatriates for their own political benefit. This article thus broadens the historiographical understanding concerning the decline of Italy’s empire and deepens the analysis of its lasting impacts on the politics and society of Republican Italy.