Shadow Country
Reimagining Place and Story in Settler Colonial Australia
Will be published approx. on 12. June 2026
166 pages
978-1-040-70169-0 (ISBN)
Description
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.
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.
Reviews / Votes
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
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Taylor & Francis Ltd
Target group
College/higher education
Product notice
Reflowable
Illustrations
5 Halftones, black and white; 5 Illustrations, black and white
File size
2,44 MB
ISBN-13
978-1-040-70169-0 (9781040701690)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Book
approx. 06/2026
1st Edition
Routledge
€191.50
Not yet published
Person
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.
Content
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
