On Beginnings: Settler Literary Nationalism and the Myth of Liberal Dreams

ABOUT

This webinar centers Palestine in its theoretical analysis of settler nationalism as a global ideological movement with a certain discourse, set of traits, and a particular kind of imagination. Zionism in its nineteenth-century formation showcases a direct line of traveling values and inspirations that moved between and across Europe and “New World” colonies, altogether establishing the settler colony’s exclusionary, possessive, and exceptionalist mindset and its replicable culture. Figures that showcase these beginnings, like Mordecai Noah, George Eliot, Emma Lazarus, Theodor Herzl, and Israel Zangwill, among others, not only represent the transnational movement of ideas that made Zionism and the foundation of Israel possible, but they prove how settler nationalism, particularly in the example of Zionism, was the product of a literary imagination, a rhetorical utopianism, and a prefigurative belief in the necessity and “rightfulness” of colonial conquest. Indeed, Zionism is a settler nationalism, and the nationalist components here are both its alibi and root problem. This webinar reveals a global genealogy that unpacks this connection and the kind of thinking that was, and remains, foundational to the inner workings of settler colonialism and its continuing rationale for its operation and existence.

Image credit: Death Road (2023), Malak Mattar.

PRESENTER

Eman Ghanayem is an assistant professor of English at the University of San Diego. Her work examines questions of displacement, settlement, and belonging through a framework of interconnected settler colonialisms and comparative Indigeneities, particularly in the context of Indigenous North America and Palestine.

ACCESSIBILITY

If you have any support requirements in order to participate fully, please let us know via aust-centre@unimelb.edu.au.

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THE SERIES

Settler Nationalism and its Discontents

In 2025, the Critical Public Conversations (CPC) series we will explore the fragility, incoherence and contradictions of contemporary settler-colonial nationalisms. We seek to understand the associated politics of race, sex/gender and identity, to analyse the connections between settler colonialism, settler nationalism, and neoliberalism.

Across the series, CPC25 will track the violence of settler nationalism within and beyond so-called Australia. This is a critical juncture. Neoliberalism is dead, but the new is not emerging. The climate catastrophes of colonialism and capitalism loom. Old imperial alliances are revived; new reactionary ones emerge. The nation and its borders are obsessively reasserted.

Sovereign Indigenous people have always been on the frontline of resisting the violence of settler nationalism. CPC25 will foreground trans/national solidarities against settler trans/nationalism, making space to explore resurgent projects of Indigenous Nation-building alongside other possibilities for living otherwise. The series will diagnose the disorders of ‘the nation’ in its present moment. In highlighting the empty, incoherent and contradictory nature of settler colonial nationalism, the series seeks to contribute to its unravelling.