Today (1 May), 3.30pm: Zoom Link

Presented by NZHA President, Associate Professor Miranda Johnson

In Australia and New Zealand, a complex politics of indigeneity and belonging after empire has generated distinctive claims about the past and the practice of history. Epistemological, political, and moral challenges to the nation as an imagined, progressive, community have fragmented academically-trained historians’ authority over their subject. Developments in these countries offer an important and telling illustration of how a crisis in nationhood is entangled with a crisis in the academic discipline of history. This seminar discusses my book project which examines that doubled crisis. It charts how, following
decolonization and the end of European empire after World Warr II, settler historians began imagining an independent settler nationhood. In the 1970s, Indigenous activists challenged settler claims to belonging, questioned the moral foundation of settler nations, and asserted their own pasts as sovereign. Those claims have sparked acrimonious disputes about who writes history, how they should do it, and for what purpose.

Miranda Johnson is an associate professor in the History programme at the University of Otago. Her work explores issues of race, indigeneity, settler identity and political and constitutional histories in settler colonial and postcolonial contexts. Her first book, The Land Is Our History: Indigeneity, Law, and the Settler State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016) examined the emergence of a new kind of Indigenous rights activism in the late twentieth century in and across three Commonwealth settler states – Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.