Abstract: A tradition of imperial geographical fantasy fuses India and Australia. This paper discusses the strategic role these utopian proposals played in imperial erotics, in aiding the foundational ambition of empire, which is to connect. The proponents of these geographical hybrids (T.J. Maslen, W. Pickering and Thomas Livingston Mitchell) occupied very different positions in Greater Britain’s colonial administration and the minority knowledges represented by their speculative overlays of India onto Australia circulated in very different cultural circles. The insider/outsider status of these ex-army, turned surveyors suggests a more complex ecology of alternative discourses circulating in the imperial imaginary: as proposals for future places, the schemes discussed in this article were fictions that aestheticized invasion, making it a metaphor for ultimate unity.

Description: Bounded by the St. Lawrence Valley to the north, Lake Champlain to the west, and the Gulf of Maine to the east, New England may be the most cohesive region in the United States, with a long and richly recorded history. In this book, Richard W. Judd explores the mix of ecological process and human activity that shaped that history over the past 12,000 years. He traces a succession of cultures through New England’s changing postglacial environment down to the 1600s, when the arrival of Europeans interrupted this coevolution of nature and culture.

A long period of tension and warfare, inflected by a variety of environmental problems, opened the way for frontier expansion. This in turn culminated in a unique landscape of forest, farm, and village that has become the embodiment of what Judd calls “second nature”— culturally modified landscapes that have superseded a more pristine “first nature.”

In the early 1800s changes in farm production and industrial process transformed central New England, while burgeoning markets at the geographical margins brought rapid expansion in fishing and logging activities. Although industrialization and urbanization severed connections to the natural world, the dominant cultural expression of the age, Romanticism, provided new ways of appreciating nature in the White Mountains and Maine woods. Spurred by these Romantic images and by a long tradition of local resource management, New England gained an early start in rural and urban conservation.

http://www.umass.edu/umpress/title/second-nature

Abstract: This article explores how affect and discourse intertwine. We analyse a corpus of newspaper editorials and comment pieces from 2013 to 2014 concerning Aotearoa New Zealand’s national day investigating how affective-discursive practices are mobilised to ‘cover the nation’ and ‘settle space’. We identify pervasive formulations of ‘bitter Māori’ and ‘indifferent Kiwis’ and the canon of affective-discursive repertoires and subject positions routinely set up as part of continuing white settler (Pākehā) cultural projects. A second objective is to contribute to the development of theory and method in studies of affect. We argue against non-representational perspectives and for a practice viewpoint that can work with entanglements of semiosis and embodied affect. Concepts from social psychological studies of discourse are applied in preference to ‘structures of feeling’, ‘affect economies’, ‘emoscapes’ and ‘emotion styles’.

Abstract: This article argues that while neoliberalism has supposedly been about ‘more markets’ in practice it has fostered the monopolisation of former state-owned assets by transnational owners. Neoliberalism is then a herald for neocolonialism, in which forms of political autonomy are undermined by transnational ownership. This process is mediated by a comprador bourgeoisie that owes very little to autonomy or development in New Zealand. The article revisits a Trotskyist polemic about the need for a transitional programme as the core of a progressive alternative.

Abstract: Henry Samuel Chapman (1803-1881) was one of the leading advocates of Responsible Government in the white-settler colonies. In tracing the biography and political opinions of one of its main proponents, we can trace roots of Responsible Government in 1830s-40s British radicalism, and see how its principles evolved in specific settler-colonial contexts, as well as being carried and adapted from Canada, to New Zealand and the Australian colonies. Chapman’s extensive writings, including his influential legal judgments, show how a high-level colonial official expressed his contradictory views on Indigenous people, both before and after his own extensive encounters with Maori in particular.

Abstract: Many non-Indigenous peoples in settler societies describe themselves as concerned with the legacies of colonialism and wish to become more engaged with that history and with Indigenous peoples. Paradoxically, however, many do not understand what that engagement might entail, how they could do it or whether, indeed, it is their place to do so. In this research, we survey findings from three sets of focus groups with non-Indigenous peoples in Canada conducted over a two-year period and intersecting with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission process that has nearly concluded there. The goal was to see what ‘emergent’ discourses of reconciliation are at play in reflective conversations between non-Aboriginal Canadians. Some strong but complex themes arise from this research, in particular a mode of ‘delegation’ and another, of ‘embodiment’. These are expressed in different rhetorical styles and speak to variations in the geography, history and identity of the participants and their communities. A broad but tentative conclusion is that for reconciliation the politics of the local matter. We explore this finding with one eye toward policy innovations and as part of a broad comparative inquiry into non-Indigenous peoples’ ideas of engagement and responsibility in settler colonial states.

Abstract: For at least half a century, catalogers have struggled with how to catalog and classify Native American and Indigenous peoples materials in library, archive, and museum collections. Understanding how colonialism works can help those in the field of knowledge organization appreciate the power dynamics embedded in the marginalization of Native American and Indigenous peoples materials through standardization, misnaming, and other practices. The decolonizing methodology of imagining provides one way that knowledge organization practitioners and theorists can acknowledge and discern the possibilities of Indigenous community-based approaches to the development of alternative information structures.

From the BBC: Australia’s Prime Minister has rejected a proposal to consult Aboriginal people first about recognising them in the nation’s constitution.

Description: The Italian nation-state has been defined by practices of mobility. Tourists have flowed in from the era of the Grand Tour to the present, and Italians flowed out in massive numbers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: Italians made up the largest voluntary emigration in recorded world history. As a bridge from Africa to Europe, Italy has more recently been a destination of choice for immigrants whose tragic stories of shipwreck and confinement are often in the news. This first-of-its-kind edited volume offers a critical accounting of those histories and practices, shedding new light on modern Italy as a flashpoint for mobilities as they relate to nationalism, imperialism, globalization, and consumer, leisure, and labor practices. The book’s eight essays reveal how a country often appreciated for what seems immutable – its classical and Renaissance patrimony – has in fact been shaped by movement and transit.

See especialy Chapter 6: Francesca Locatelli, ‘Migrating to the Colonies and Building the Myth of ‘Italiani brava gente’: The Rise, Demise, and Legacy of Italian Settler Colonialism’.

Abstract: During the 19th century, sublime depictions of North American mounds captivated Euro-American colonists and Romantic travelers. Settlers frequently embedded farms and homesteads into the material fabric of these Indigenous ruins across the American Bottom region and surrounding uplands, uncovering traces of antiquity in the process. Focusing on the Emerald mound site and broader mound discourses, I examine how material intimacies underlying this 19th-century phenomenon periodically corrupted Romantic sensibilities. Specifically, I highlight aspects of archival and spatial data that capture fleeting moments when mound intercourse generated uncanny affects and queer temporalities. I argue that in moments when uncanny affects haunted colonial homes, Indigenous histories queered the tense of settler colonialism.