Shadow Country by Emily Potter

Shadow Country by Emily Potter

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.

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.