BC Studies Special Issue on Colonialism

I am delighted to be co-editing the following special issue of BC Studies with my colleague, Henry Yu:

Histories of Colonialism: P/repositioning British Columbia
Over the past two decades, the “new” imperial history has reconfigured scholarly understandings of imperialism and colonialism in part by using new prepositions in its questions. Studies of networks, webs, flows, circuits, and connections trace trajectories of empire across, between, beyond, from, to, and through. A focus on race and gender enables explorations of with, within, and without, while work on imperial affect, emotion, and the everyday is driven by questions about among and inside. The emerging field of settler colonial studies is situated both inside and outside of these developments, working to frame and interrogate settler colonialism as a distinct imperial formation. While a growing body of scholarship examines how British Columbia has been fundamentally shaped by these processes, more remains to be done to unpack their manifestations here.

This special issue of BC Studies will assess the possibilities and limitations of new imperial and settler colonial approaches in British Columbia’s history. We particularly seek to explore how British Columbia’s colonial history might be p/repositioned by using and troubling these frameworks. How do the questions of new imperial history and settler colonial studies open up new analytical pathways in British Columbia? How might we work through, across, between, and beyond these approaches? And how might doing so enable us to understand British Columbia’s history as local, regional, national, imperial, and/or transnational in new ways? In investigating such questions, the special issue seeks to address the possibilities of the following broad themes for re-thinking British Columbia:

  • Connections, flows, networks, economies, and place-making.
  • Migrations and mobilities: arrivals, transience, passages through, leaving.
  • Border-crossing, hybridity, mixings.
  • Affect, emotion, and colonial everydays.
  • Configurations and collisions of colonial systems, settler and otherwise.
  • Resistance, response, silence, absence.
  • Memory, commemoration, history-telling.

Article proposals were submitted in April 2014, and are currently under review.

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