Disputed Territories: Land, Culture and Identity in Settler Societies

Disputed Territories investigates the significance of land for contesting cultural identities in comparable settler societies. In the regions of Australasia and southern Africa, European visions of landscape and nature have engaged with southern hemisphere environments and the cultures of indigenous peoples. Amid conflicts over land as a material resource, there has also been an intellectual contest over the aesthetic, iconic and cultural meanings of natural forms and species. Arising from a programme of seminars held at The University of Western Australia, this collection of eminent international authors assembles contributions from anthropology, geography, history and literary studies. The combination of diverse methods and theoretical approaches establishes the ways that land and nature constitute disputed territories in the mind, as well as material resources subject to pragmatic negotiations.

David S. Trigger is an anthropologist and author of Whitefella Comin’ Aboriginal Responses to Colonialism in Northern Australia. Gareth Griffiths is a literary scholar whose books include The Empire Writes Back Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literatures (with Bill Ashcroft and Helen Tiffin), and his recent volume, African Literatures in English East and West. Both based for some years at The University of Western Australia, they have debated, and sought to make productive, the cross-disciplinary tensions between ethnographic, historical and textualist approaches to cultural analysis.