Theoretical Frontiers

Works on Indigenous histories have long been sites for both the production and application of theoretical models. In this chapter, I examine the emergence of a school of histories of settler colonialism, locating it within a genealogy that has built upon and critiqued frontier histories in Australia and the U.S. The frontier as a method has led historians to return to its performative representations in order to understand settler colonial relations and to emphasise continuities and draw histories into the present. This chapter traces the influence of frontier historiographies of the late nineteenth century, before turning to revisionist moves first to include Indigenous people and colonial violence in these accounts and second to do away with the frontier model and instead examine contact zones, middle grounds, borderlands, and Indigenous political formations. More recently, many historians have returned to the frontier motif to insist on the continuity of the relationships developed during persistent struggles over land and sovereignty. But though some of these histories centre Indigenous perspectives, some others adopting a similar analytic have neglected Indigenous politics and agency: the chapter calls for a renewed attention to Indigenous social structures, articulated with but not necessarily dominated by those structures of invasion inaugurated on frontiers