Pursuits of Settler Belonging in Australian Post-Millennial Memoirs

By (author) Martina Horáková

ISBN13: 9781839990571

Imprint: Anthem Press

Publisher: Anthem Press

Format: Hardback

Published: 31/12/2025

Availability: Not yet available

Description
The book focuses on various ways of articulating settler belonging in Australian memoir since the turn of the 21st century. After Australia witnessed a reinvigorated public interest in the revisionist history of European settlement and colonial violence, resulting in the dispossession of Indigenous people and damaged settler–Indigenous relations, Australian settler majority has experienced an unsettlement of their sense of belonging, or the so-called “setter anxiety.” The book analyzes how settler (un)belonging is narrativized in popular memoirs written by Australian public intellectuals, such as historians, artists, writers, and commentators, in the period after 2000. These memoirs of settler belonging share one aspect: they all ask and seek answers to the implicit question, how to belong as a White settler who bears witness to the legacy of violent colonization vis-à-vis continuing Indigenous dispossession? How to justify the settler presence in and love of the land that was stolen from First Australians? The individual chapters examine historians’ memoirs, White women’s travel narratives, experimental place-writing, and eco- and landscape memoirs, tracing a gradual shift in literary representations of settler anxiety and detecting new perspectives on what can be called ethical settler belonging.
  • Literary studies: post-colonial literature
  • Professional & Vocational
Height:229
Width:153
Spine:26
Weight:454.00
List Price: £80.00