Dwelling on the Margins of Empire

This book considers histories of home from the margins, highlighting the perspectives of displaced, colonised, and disenfranchised groups in imperial and settler colonial contexts. Embracing the concept of marginality as a method for recovering histories of home, this book explores communities that have been seen to exist outside of western models of nineteenth- and twentieth-century domesticity, particularly as they were transplanted in – and transformed by – settler, Indigenous, and imperial geographies across the globe. In focusing their attention on Indigenous perspectives on home in the face of – and despite – colonial dislocations, both cultural and territorial, several contributors expose home’s function as a site of cultural vitality and political resistance, as well as colonial violence, across a range of geographical contexts. In addition to highlighting previously marginalised, non-western perspectives on home, this collection explores the operation of domestic politics within nominally undomesticated spaces, as well as within seemingly “unhomely” historical experiences – such as political activism, intergenerational trauma, and geographical exploration. In so doing, it invites critical re-evaluations of home as a category of analysis within imperial, settler colonial, and Indigenous histories on a variety of fronts. Chapters are organised around three key themes, previously positioned in opposition to normative understandings of home, that contributors have reimagined as intrinsic to material and imagined geographies of home: travel and mobility; politics and public life; and colonial violence.