AustLit

'Viruses and colonialism are hand in glove, to posit an unsanitary metaphor. As Jared Diamond writes in Guns, Germs and Steel, his bestselling global history, European colonisation, particularly in the Americas and Australasia, cannot be understood without reference to the terrible, at times genocidal, ravages of disease on indigenous societies. Yet at the same time, and in a bitter irony, anxieties about disease and dirt were used to justify invasion, racial discrimination and paternalist colonial laws. While European germs wiped out indigenous communities, it was colonised subjects who were constructed as the harbingers of disease. The colonial project was imagined not just as a religious, moral and economic mission, but as an exercise in public health.' (Introduction)

'The Settler Colonial Present explores the ways in which settler colonialism as a specific mode of domination informs the global present. It presents an argument regarding its extraordinary resilience and diffusion and reflects on the need to imagine its decolonisation.' [publisher's summary]

'Tim Rowe's critique of settler colonial studies is twofold: he alleges that a singular unbending logic characterises its interpretative approach, and that this approach is so flexible that it encompasses, for example,‘the removal of children’, the‘erection of a monument to the Stolen Generations’,‘the denial of native title or the recognition of native title’and‘the remembrance of violence or the forgetting of violence’. Rowse’s argument is that the structure is so rigid as to be all-encompassing, and to account for, in a theological manner, for any event that might occur. Here I see a contradiction, because even if Rowse’s criticism focuses on the putative strictures of a rigid interpretative model, it is the ability to encompass ostensibly contradictory phenomena that Rowse finds most‘unhelpful’. I would argue, in response, that Rowse cannot have it both ways.One cannot be simultaneously too rigid and too flexible. Rowse’s indictment would be more effective if he had produced one accusation and proceeded to demonstrate it. This is not only a matter of internal argumentative inconsistency,however. The problem, I believe, is that Rowse comprehensively misreads settler colonial studies’reliance on Wolfe’s logic of elimination. My response rejects the notion that settler colonial studies is a‘dangerous’undertaking.'

'A vivid exploration of the history of a very powerful and long lasting idea: building European worlds outside of Europe. Veracini outlines how the founding of new societies was envisaged and practiced and explores the specific ways in which settler colonial projects tried to establish ideal and regenerated political bodies.' [publisher's summary]