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.

Abstract: In July 2022, Pope Francis undertook a penitential pilgrimage to Canada, where he apologized to Indigenous peoples for “the evil” committed by Christians during the Age of Discovery. Then, in March 2023, the Holy See––the ‘government’ of the Catholic Church––issued a historic “Joint Statement [on] the ‘Doctrine of Discovery,’” identifying this “Doctrine” as the philosophical framework Europeans used to colonize the globe and the articulation of a conjunction of factors that birthed anti-Indigenous racism. Despite this increased public profile, the “Doctrine of Discovery” is not salient to philosophers. Yet this paucity is not benign. Those who ignore this Doctrine’s historical and ongoing impact on Indigenous peoples offer missed opportunities at best or eliminationist agendas at worst. These are existential stakes, indeed; but there is also much at stake, philosophically. Journey to a Critical Theory of Discovery stakes a claim on Indigenous social relations to land. In Chapter One, I examine how the Doctrine of Discovery evolved into a racialized “agricultural argument” for Indigenous dispossession and a new religion of whiteness. In Chapter Two, I reanimate Karl Marx’s lost texts on dispossession and offer my distinctive research contribution, speculative expropriation. In Chapter Three, I use my novel concept to demonstrate how the invention of private property and white masculinity lay at the social, political, and erotic origins of the settler state. In Chapter Four, I explore Indigenous responses to Discovery developed by Jim Brady (1908 – 1967), an Indigenous Marxist who established a partitioned mode of eco-decolonial communism. In the Conclusion, I suggest that Brady’s land-based economic co-ops pose crucial, urgent, and necessary implications for the history of our present climate crisis. As an urgent contribution to Indigenous philosophy, Social and Political Philosophy, and Political Theory, this “journey” presents an alternative eco-political imaginary that opens up for us only when we seriously consider the wisdom embodied in Indigenous social relations to land, relations that contain concrete solutions for transcending capitalism, colonialism, and climate change. Responses to settler-colonialism must not merely seek to re-possess the land––as if it were inherently fungible––but take the even more radical step of ameliorating and recruiting land as a subject in decolonization; an ameliorative politics of territorial rematriation we hear echoed in the grassroots call, “Land Back.”

Abstract: This dissertation studies selections of intellectual production on settler colonialism as it concerns the theory and history of capitalism. Part I engages the consolidation of an intellectual paradigm in the post-Cold War period, which I call, “settler colonial reason.” This critical orientation to the history and present of society combines a schematic theory of settler colonialism with the remarkable salience of Marx’s notion of so-called primitive accumulation in the same decades. In the paradigm, the passage of history, particularly the history of capitalism, is principally intelligible as a repetition of origins. Whatever might happen in history, it is always and ultimately an expression of its foundational and structural “logics”—so many new forms or rounds of enclosure, dispossession, and elimination. I elaborate a critique of this paradigm across two chapters: one treating it directly and the other assessing its recent application to the history of Palestine. Part II seeks alternatives in a longer intellectual history of colonization and the uneven historical development of capitalism, beginning with classical political economy. The combined colonial and commercial policy of specific heterodox thinkers provided a conceptual solution to impasses in industrial capitalism’s early stages. I argue that “systematic colonization” in theory and Anglo settler colonialism in practice facilitated the co-existence, in metropole and colony, of high wages and high profits—in a word, “economic development.” This assigns paramount significance to the unprecedented and unrepeatable mass migration of working people from an industrializing center to an agrarian settlement for absolutely high wages, and the trade and investment relations between these regions. The final chapter tracks these themes into twentieth-century thought on economic development, including mainstream postwar development theorists, economic historians, and their critics. Through this investigation, I formalize the role of wage spreads to global patterns of economic development and underdevelopment, especially those opened by the non-replicable history of Anglo settlement. Altogether, the dissertation advocates for an approach to settler colonialism that is not typological (differentiated by internal “logics” at the national level). It pursues instead the intellectual means for determining settler colonialism concretely within and as part of the uneven historical development of capitalism.