Shadow Country
Reimagining Place and Story in Settler Colonial Australia
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Taylor & Francis Ltd
Published:12th Jun '26
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
This book explores a series of Australian 'shadow places' that manifest complex stories of colonised Australia in the throes of environmental crisis. These are places—from nuclear testing grounds, to extractivist landscapes, to the frontiers of colonial violence—that bear the heaviest burdens of capitalist colonial culture, but are routinely considered out of sight and out of mind. Engaging with a range of shadow places across southern Australia via literary, cultural, and critical sources, Shadow Country argues that these places are with us all the time, threaded into the imaginative and material worlds that compose our homes. Through localised stories of environmental disaster, colonial violence, and profound injustice, shadow places connect to the most pressing issues facing human society—environmental futures, social justice, and the imperative of decolonisation.
This book will be of great interest to students and scholars with an interest in the intersection of environmental crisis and colonial legacies, and the complexity of living in a time of reckoning with these.
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
ISBN: 9781032417646
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 470g
150 pages