Kansas’ tumultuous, violent early years drove the development of a distinctively intrusive, inexpert model of reform. The KCIR was a clear elaboration upon this historical pattern. Constitutional restraints left the state persistently underfinanced. The conflicts of the Bleeding Kansas period catalyzed political and mob violence that persisted until the 1890s. Progressive Republicans, the dominant political force in Kansas from the 1890s through the 1920s, thus developed an aggressive program of regulation of economic and personal conduct, a program not reliant on rational administration, for which there was no fiscal capacity or expertise, but upon an expansive legal conception of regulatory (or flatly coercive) interventions justifiable by appeal to the public interest. These reforms were often ineffective or too bold to withstand scrutiny in the US Supreme Court. The state’s leaders, like Governor Allen, had considerable first-hand experience with the difficulties, and in many cases the violence, of settlement: Their commitment to the state’s forceful variant of progressivism rose from deep and genuine fear of social disorder.

This chapter provides an overview of the emergence of a body of literature that emplots Indigenous material realities and forms of knowledge into Latinx literature’s representational horizon. These texts mark a significant transition, moving away from an understanding of Latinx identity rooted in a mythological Indian past, and focusing instead on a diverse array of issues grounded in Indigenous identities, experiences, and epistemologies. These include explorations of the liberatory potential in transnational feminist solidarities, the thematization of contemporary manifestations of settler colonialism, the foregrounding of land-based knowledge, and the celebration of the creative power and insurgent force of the erotic. Focusing on works by Graciela Limón, Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Natalie Diaz, and Alan Pelaez Lopez, the chapter argues that these writings collectively depict Latinx Indigeneity at the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and colonialism, raising complex issues with respect to overlapping and ongoing histories of colonization and fostering an opportunity for centering Indigenous experiences while interrogating the multiracial character of Latinidad.

This introductory chapter discusses the focus of this monograph, and places it in its theoretical, contextual and methodological context. Working from the premise that while gender shapes violence, violence also shapes gender, I introduce the central line of enquiry of this book: the gendered politics of settler colonialism, with a specific focus on masculinities across the sharply hierarchical divide of Israeli militarism and occupied Palestine.

The empirical research is placed within its historical context, serving to contextualise the settler colonial present – the application of which is explicated within this section. My own positionality, research methodology and the structure of the book is discussed after articulation of the conceptual framework of the book. The latter explores theory and literature surrounding gender, masculinities, violence, and their intersections – affirming Demetriou’s (2001, 342–48) argument that “when the conditions for the reproduction of patriarchy change”, “exemplary masculinities […] adapt accordingly.”

The concluding chapter highlights the fluidity and interconnected nature of masculinities within specific interactional settings across Israel and Palestine, indicating that what is hailed as ‘the ideal’ is ever subject to change amid complex webs of power, patriarchy, and militarised colonisation. Each telling components of much broader and complex stories, I summarise each chapter as indicative of the contingency and mutual adaptability of gendered dynamics across manufactured, militarised, and sharply hierarchical colonial divides. I argue that gendered identities in this context are connected by that which simultaneously separates them – the militarised violence of the colonial regime. In so doing, the intertwined nature of identities across and enmeshed within complex webs of power, violence and resistance are explored, revealing a plurality of scripts and codes that variously constitute the complex gendered politics of settler colonialism.

Chapter I explores traditionally ‘non-hegemonic’ attributes as inherent to militarised masculinities in contemporary Israel, examining embodied compliance and submission to a higher order as a normalised means of ascending the ‘hierarchy of bodies’ that bolsters and undergirds the Zionist project from its outset. Exploring basic training, punishments, military hierarchy, friendship, camaraderie and death, I argue that the conscious performance of embodied submission (with enthusiastic consent) is as much valued within conscripted military masculinities as militarised domination in this context. Indeed, I suggest that the conscripted combat soldier – the archetypal national and masculine hero – must be both visibly dominant over the indigenous Palestinian ‘Other’, while simultaneously malleable and submissive to the goals of the Israeli state. As such, I explore both polarities of domination and submission as demanded within the parameters of idealised military masculinity – illustrating the gendered tensions that punctuate normative binaries in this militarised setting.

This chapter takes plantation as a rubric under which theorizations of race and space in Marxism and Black and Indigenous critical theory might be usefully coordinated for the sake not only of intersectional practicality but intellectual purchase for literary scholars in particular. Historically associated with the racializing regimes of both settler colonialism and enslavement that made what historian James Belich has called “the Anglo-world,” plantation comes into view as a key means through which capitalist social relations originating in late medieval southeastern England have been planted across the planet to the massive detriment of human and nonhuman life. Understood as sites at which the compulsion to expand set in motion by capital in the metropole confronts noncapital in its most resistant difference, white settler colonies in North America and Oceania are treated as experimental spaces for the satisfaction of that compulsion – that is, as not only spatial but phenomenological frontiers of real subsumption. This chapter focuses on one such experiment: the settler/master’s assumption of the role of the God of Genesis, specifically the power to bring worlds out of and into being through acts of signification, the whole-cloth fiction of race foremost among them.

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?