Description:
This book examines Australian memoirs of settler belonging written by public intellectuals--writers, historians, academics, journalists--which attempt to come to terms with the history of colonial violence and dispossession of Indigenous people, and articulate new perspectives on how to belong ethically in a settler colony of the 21st century.
Review Quotes:
"This book asks hard questions--insistently and passionately. Yet its arguments are careful and scrupulous, dissecting their topic with meticulous surgical precision. Martina Horáková is an outstanding scholar whose comprehensive study of settler memoir is the most important intervention in the broader field since Kay Schaffer's groundbreaking work." -- Anne Brewster, University of New South Wales, Australia.
"Horáková delivers a compelling and rigorous analysis of Australian memoirs of settler belonging, tracing a shift from anxious reckonings to deep attachment to Country. She interrogates the ethical stakes of this transformation, revealing how narratives of entitlement persist beneath eco-conscious aesthetics. Offering the perspective of a cultural and spatial outsider, this vital work challenges readers to confront the politics of place and the enduring myths of settler belonging shaping Australia's national imagination." -- Lisa Slater, University of Wollongong, Australia.
"Martina Horáková illuminates the challenge of belonging on stolen land for settler Australians with a generative critical eye. She understands the "memoir of settler belonging" as a cultural form with complex political and ethical intentions that are not always aligned with the truth-telling that First Nations people call for." -- Emily Potter, Deakin University, Australia.