Cinematic Settlers

This anthology adds to the burgeoning field of settler colonial studies by examining settler colonial narratives in the under analyzed medium of film.

Cinematic Settlers discusses different cinematic genres, national traditions, and specific movies in order to expose related threads, shared circulations of knowledge, and paralleled representations. Organized into thematic groupings—conquest, settlers, natives, and space—the contributors explore the question of how film compares to written genres and other visual media in representing and effecting settler colonialism on a global scale. Striving for inclusiveness, the volume covers different eras and settler colonial situations in Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, Hawaii, the American West, Canada, Latin America, Russia, France, Algeria, German Africa, South Africa, and even the next frontier: outer space. By showing how films offer layered, contested, and dynamic settler colonial narratives that advance and challenge settler hegemonic readings, the essays enable students to better analyze and understand the complex history of diversity and colonialism in film.

This book is important reading for undergraduate classes on the history of empire, colonialism, and film.

Author Biography

Dr Janne Lahti is an Academy of Finland Research Fellow in History at the University of Helsinki, Finland. He specializes in global and transnational histories of settler colonialism, borderlands, American West, and Nordic colonialism. His books include German and United States Colonialism in a Connected World: Entangled Empires (2020), The American West and the World: Transnational and Comparative Perspectives (2019), and Wars for Empire: Apaches, the United States, and the Southwest Borderlands (2017).

Professor Rebecca Weaver-Hightower is Chair of English at North Dakota State University. Her publications include Frontier Fictions: Settler Sagas and Postcolonial Guilt (2018), Empire Islands: Castaways, Cannibals, and Fantasies of Conquest, (2007), Postcolonial Film: History, Empire, Resistance (2014, co-edited with Peter Hulme), and another collection on settler literatures Archiving Settler Colonialism: Culture, Space, and Race, (2018, co-edited with Yuting Huang).