Dwelling on the Margins of Empire: Colonized and Indigenous Peoples’ Imaginaries of Home

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.

Lisa Binkley is Assistant Professor in material culture and Indigenous and settler women’s histories at Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada. Her research considers quilts and other textiles as points of intimate intercultural contact between settler and Indigenous women in nineteenth-century Canada.

Katherine Crooks is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Mount Saint Vincent University, Canada. Her work considers the intersection of settler and Indigenous women’s histories in northern Canadian contexts. Her research explores how settler and Indigenous women’s involvement in American exploratory expeditions to the Arctic between 1890 and 1940 shaped and were shaped by their understandings of home.