This chapter explores how country and city stand in as proxies for political, racial, and cultural positions. The country operates as the custodian of the “real America,” which becomes imagined as white, masculine, traditionalist, and working class. The city, meanwhile, teems with the elite and the cosmopolitan. Such gestures conjure away any trace of Indigenous peoples, migrant farmers and ranchers, urban–rural labor alliances, black agrarian Populists, and the city’s intersectional working class. Even as we must acknowledge the generative role country-and-city scholarship has played in US literary criticism, this chapter ultimately calls for rethinking this binary by turning to texts that provide a different account of the rural – a narrative that the country as a concept so effectively obfuscates. Writing by authors such as Hamlin Garland and Zitkála-Šá, conventionally categorized as local-color or regionalist, demonstrates that scarcity and survivance rather than city and country shaped the cultural politics of rural spaces in the nineteenth century. They both challenged the bureaucratic state, as an entity that protected the interests of finance capital by subjecting settlers to constant precarity and violently seeking to dispossess Indigenous peoples of their own land, liberty, and literature.

This chapter lingers on the very notion of territory itself as a spatial imaginary, a literary trope, and a political crucible for competing ideas of sovereignty. In particular, it examines how territory, or perhaps more precisely, territoriality, did not simply work at the behest of US empire but also served as an essential spatial register for working alongside and even against US territorial annexation, occupation, and colonization. Throughout the nineteenth century, the United States asserted an understanding of sovereignty that foregrounded dominance over a territory and its inhabitants. At the broadest scale, territory denoted the sovereign’s property (the United States), and sovereignty denoted control over territory. Settler-colonial notions of sovereignty and territory conflicted with Indigenous understandings of sovereignty that often foreground responsibility to human and other-than-human relatives within a shared space or territory rather than possession of property. This chapter’s three sections, “Terra Nullius,” “Indian Territory,” and “Black Territories,” each take up a concept of territoriality that profoundly influenced US colonial expansion at the expense of other narratives of placemaking. Each section details how narratives of territoriality forcefully shaped US politics and culture while also describing competing notions of placemaking that disrupt these dominant narratives.

Explores relationship of law to communal agriculture in three contexts; Indigenous communal grazing; Spanish and Mexican land grants; and Colorado state law of property rights.

This chapter argues that what Gerard Manley Hopkins termed the “rural scene” provided a focal point in the 1870s for profound changes in the Victorian understanding, valuation, and transformation of the natural world. British writing at this time demonstrates a shift from viewing the rural scene as picturesque landscape, as evidenced in provincial novels such as George Eliot’s Middlemarch, to conceiving of it as an environment encompassing human and nonhuman nature, notably in Richard Jefferies’ nature writings and Thomas Hardy’s first Wessex novels. Grasping the full scope of Victorian responses to the rural scene in the 1870s also requires looking to the expanding pastoral industries of the settler empire. Writing in and about the settler colonies of Australia and New Zealand, by Lady Barker, Rolf Boldrewood, and Anthony Trollope, highlights how a perceived absence of rural aesthetic values helped render colonial nature available for transformation and subsequent economic exploitation.

How, given the murder of those demanding a more representative political system at Peterloo in 1819, did more Britons, at home and in the colonies, get to vote by 1885?

How did those Britons who believed that free trade and the gold standard had effortlessly made Britain a world hegemon in 1885 lose the faith by 1931 when their Empire was the largest in the world?

Britain remained the world’s superpower in 1931, so how did it lose its Empire, become dependent upon the USA and reimagine itself as a European nation by 1976 and how did Briton’s respond?

This chapter contributes a decolonising analysis of tax primarily in the Canadian settler colonial context. I examine the legal constitution of the First Nations Financial Transparency Act in relation to its attempts to reform First Nations’ governance. I demonstrate how the federal government looked to organise a ‘taxpayer’ ethos amongst First Nations citizens through publicising First Nations band salary details and audits. This taxpayer ethos was meant to simultaneously encourage citizens to critique their governments rather than the Canadian federal government, but also to promote private property on reserves. I make a theoretical argument for the necessity of thinking through tax with a decolonising lens that both specifically respects the sovereignty of Indigenous nations and offers a critique of how tax operates to erode that very sovereignty.

By recovering fragments of the political negotiations that took place between native peoples and European colonizing powers in the settler colonies of Canada and Australia, this chapter argues that treaty-making was central to the ability of Indigenous peoples to assert the rights they wanted, rather than those they were granted, against imperial and colonial states. In settler colonies, colonial states used the principles of protection and assimilation to establish the legal status of Indigenous peoples to create them as subjects within a particular legal order that set the place of everyone in relation to the sovereign. Without a treaty, Indigenous peoples were effectively placed in a position where they could only claim rights that were compatible with the aims of protection in the nineteenth century, and so were defined by the colonial authorities. Yet the language of ‘rights’ could restrict, or even distort, some of the political arguments that Indigenous peoples wanted to assert, for example in relation to hunting and fishing rights that Europeans understood in terms of access to resources in order to secure their subsistence.

Nikki Hessell’s “Romantic Poetry and Constructions of Indigeneity” understands the Romantic racialization of Indigenous peoples as means of denying these groups sovereignty. The trope of the Indian in representative European texts is, by this reading, complicit with the “desire to own, define, and administer everything.” By reading Romantic poetry for its recurring tropes, however, we can also locate the Romantic tradition in the work of those generally excluded from conversations about Romanticism. Thus Hessell reads Romanticism in the works of Indigenous poets Jane Johnston Schoolcraft (Ojibwe) and John Rollin Ridge (Cherokee). This is not merely a matter of expanding the Romantic canon; rather, by centering those whose presence in Romantic literature has generally been restricted to object of interest, Hessell shows that those who have been used as tropes are wielders of Romantic tropes in their own right.

This chapter explains different definitions of citizenship including citizenship as status, as rights, as participation, and as identity. It highlights key immigration laws and periods of immigrant inclusion and exclusion. The chapter also presents basic data on demographic change through American political history.

This chapter considers how understandings of poet and nation in Australia are divided between the settler institutions of literature and poetry and Indigenous traditions. For white Australia, nation functions as a mythic and political collective, while for First Nations people, it is an alien, oppressive framework that ignores sovereignty and is of short historical duration. The chapter considers how colonial and early Federation poets conceived of Australia as a nation in relation to the global North while post-Federation poets like A. D. Hope and Ania Walwicz identify and critique a national consciousness from quite different standpoints. The chapter includes an analysis of a proposed poetic preamble to the Australian Constitution that was defeated by referendum, along with a move to become a republic. The chapter outlines the recognition of Indigenous land rights through the Mabo decision (1992) and its impact on literature. Lastly, it considers how contemporary Aboriginal writer Evelyn Araluen satirically rejects ongoing national mythologies in her recent work, Dropbear (2021).

This chapter traces the development of Judith Wright’s poetics, outlining her early focus on specific places and their legacies rather than on ideas of nation. It offers close readings of poems like “South of My Days,” “Bullocky,” and “Bora Ring.” The chapter then identifies mid-career attention to interpersonal relations before considering Wright’s growing awareness of settler-colonial privilege, Aboriginal sovereignty, different orders of temporality, and a continued expression of love for the land. The chapter reflects on the impact of Wright’s friendship with Aboriginal poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal and analyses “Two Dreamtimes.” It also examines Wright’s decision in 1990 to forego writing poetry in order to embrace environmental activism.

This chapter considers how nineteenth-century poetry in Australia adapted European conceptualisations of the sublime and the gothic to articulate a literal inability to settle on the land. It argues that settler poetry has a difficulty with being grounded: its representations have a tendency to hover, sublimely, above the surface of the earth; or, if forced under, they refuse to simply die: but live on, as gothic, revenant, voices. It draws on popular and canonical examples like A. B. (Banjo) Paterson’s “The Man from Snowy River” and “Waltzing Matilda,” Adam Lindsay Gordon’s “The Sick Stockrider,” and Mary Gilmore’s “Old Botany Bay,” as well as examples that have been sourced from historical archives.