Dwelling on the Margins of Empire - (Empire's Other Histories) by Lisa Binkley (Hardcover)

About the Book

This book considers histories of home from the margins, highlighting the perspectives of displaced, colonised, and disenfranchised groups in imperial and settler colonial contexts.

Book Synopsis

Embracing the concept of marginality as a method for recovering histories of home, this book explores communities that have been seen to exist outside of western models of nineteenth- and twentieth-century domesticity, particularly as they were transplanted in - and transformed by - settler, Indigenous, and imperial geographies across the globe.

In focusing their attention on Indigenous perspectives on home in the face of - and despite - colonial dislocations, both cultural and territorial, several contributors expose home's function as a site of cultural vitality and political resistance, as well as colonial violence, across a range of geographical contexts. In addition to highlighting previously marginalised, non-western perspectives on home, this collection explores the operation of domestic politics within nominally undomesticated spaces, as well as within seemingly "unhomely" historical experiences - such as political activism, intergenerational trauma, and geographical exploration. In so doing, it invites critical re-evaluations of home as a category of analysis within imperial, settler colonial, and Indigenous histories on a variety of fronts. Chapters are organised around three key themes, previously positioned in opposition to normative understandings of home, that contributors have reimagined as intrinsic to material and imagined geographies of home: travel and mobility; politics and public life; and colonial violence.

Review Quotes

"In this spatially attuned and timely collection, editor Lisa Binkley brings together vital and diverse voices to disrupt concepts of "home" from perspectives of the colonial periphery. Unlike studies that remain rooted in western ideals of home as haven, even as it critiques them, this book reimagines violence and unhomeliness as commonplace inhabitants of domestic space, and, in doing so, fundamentally upturns histories of settlement, exploration, art and nation. Centering Indigenous experiences, gender relations and different kinds of home-sense, Dwelling on the Margins is set to reignite scholarship in the field." --Laura Cameron, Professor of Geography, Queen's University, Canada

About the Author

Lisa Binkley is Associate Professor in material culture and Indigenous and settler women's histories at Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada. Her research considers quilts and other textiles as points of intimate intercultural contact between settler and Indigenous women in nineteenth-century Canada. She is founding Lead for the Material Culture Collective (materialculturecollective.ca).