Summoning Spectres: Nostalgic Histories and Counter-Histories in Settler-Colonial Algerian and Australian Cultural Production - Progress Review - Tiarni Miller

In an interview with Metropolis M, Waanyi artist Gordon Hookey claimed, “for me, there is no decoloniality or post-coloniality, just one term, coloniality.”  In this statement, Hookey echoes the concerns of a body of cultural and social historians engaged in postcolonial discourse on the possibility of speaking from a "postcolonial" position in a state still deeply entrenched in the colonial condition. This thesis draws Hookey's statement into a transimperial conversation on emotion and "critical" colonial discourse that begins in Algeria and Australia in the 1860s - two settler-colonial societies rarely analysed side-by-side. In this presentation, I open my analysis of four cultural works situated across the divide of time, culture and relation to power, all produced with the intent to challenge settler-colonial notions of difference (colonized/colonizer, civilised/uncivilised, rational/irrational, present and future/past). How might a reading informed by Svetlana Boym's concept of nostalgia help to identify the point at which histories and counter-histories are differentiated in collective memory?