Place, Land, and the Decolonization of the Settler Soul

My aim in this essay is to wonder where in the world I am now as a scholar of place and a lover of places, and to give some shape to where I have been. I begin by reflecting on how I came to discover that “place” matters—at a historical moment (the 1990s) in which academic interest in place surged. Next, I address some of the controversies and silences that surround critical pedagogies of place. Much of this discussion is inspired by diverse perspectives toward the difficult and contested work of “decolonization,” one of the primary aims of critical place study. Finally, I delve into my own uncertainties and hopes around decolonization: what I discuss here as the lifelong, generational project of cosmological homecoming—the cultivation of the soul. I hope to show that the politics of decolonization must be spacious enough for white settlers like myself to examine and cultivate our own interior worlds. Whatever its prospects, decolonization depends on human beings who know who and where they are, who and where they come from, and how to negotiate the interplay between the soul and the polis.