On Beginnings: Settler Literary Nationalism and the Myth of Liberal Dreams
This webinar is the second in the Australian Centre's 2025 Critical Public Conversations series: Settler Nationalism and its Discontents.
This webinar centers Palestine in its theoretical analysis of settler nationalism as a global ideological movement with a certain discourse, set of traits, and a particular kind of imagination. Zionism in its nineteenth-century formation showcases a direct line of traveling values and inspirations that moved between and across Europe and “New World” colonies, altogether establishing the settler colony’s exclusionary, possessive, and exceptionalist mindset and its replicable culture. Figures that showcase these beginnings, like Mordecai Noah, George Eliot, Emma Lazarus, Theodor Herzl, and Israel Zangwill, among others, not only represent the transnational movement of ideas that made Zionism and the foundation of Israel possible, but they prove how settler nationalism, particularly in the example of Zionism, was the product of a literary imagination, a rhetorical utopianism, and a prefigurative belief in the necessity and “rightfulness” of colonial conquest. Indeed, Zionism is a settler nationalism, and the nationalist components here are both its alibi and root problem. This webinar reveals a global genealogy that unpacks this connection and the kind of thinking that was, and remains, foundational to the inner workings of settler colonialism and its continuing rationale for its operation and existence.
Eman Ghanayem is an assistant professor of English at the University of San Diego. Her work examines questions of displacement, settlement, and belonging through a framework of interconnected settler colonialisms and comparative Indigeneities, particularly in the context of Indigenous North America and Palestine.