1st Edition
Shadow Country Reimagining Place and Story in Settler Colonial Australia
Introduction: Living with Shadows 1. Uranium Legacies and Radioactive Histories 2. Slow Violence and True Crime Stories: Chloe Hooper’s The Arsonist and Tom Doig’s Hazelwood in Australia’s Latrobe Valley 3. Endings and Futures in the Western District: Hostile Architecture and Settler Colonial Place-Making 4. Ecocide, Domicide, and the Limits of the White Family in Briohny Doyle’s Echolalia 5. Reimagining Home and Expanding Family in Lia Hills’ The Desert Knows Her Name 6. Plant Communities and Shadow Waters in Linda Tegg’s Living Installations 7. The Shadows of Home: Returning to Adelaide. Coda
Biography
Emily Potter is Professor of Writing, Literature and Culture in the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University. Her previous books include Writing Belonging at the Millennium: Notes from the Field on Settler Colonial Place.
Emily Potter’s Shadow Country is a prescient and necessary book—a powerful critique of settler times and imaginaries that shape Australia’s colonial past and extractive futures. With clarity and care, Potter traces the debris of settler-colonial place-making practices that continue to shadow landscapes, while opening space for what exists otherwise: reparative, hopeful, decolonial modes of being together in the world. This book invites us to reckon with histories of harm and to imagine more generative futures grounded in fragile but persistent ethical relations.
Professor Donna Houston, School of Communication, Society and Culture, Macquarie University, Sydney Australia
Emily Potter’s Shadow Country is an important and timely analysis of Australia’s settler colonial present. This book focuses on those vanishing points—called ‘shadow places’ by the philosopher Val Plumwood—where colonial privilege and extractivist industry secrete their externalities. Adroitly blending literary and cultural criticism, Shadow Country uncovers the processes by which Australia hides its dirty work in the plain sight of its public euphemisms. But Potter also shows how communities have refused to go quietly along with these impositions. Again and again, Potter brings us to these points of refusal, protest, bleak irony and uncanny ambivalence. Shadow Country advocates for a messier, more honest and more fully enlivened world.
Professor Tony Hughes-D’Aeth, Chair of Australian Literature, University of Western Australia
