AustLit

'In 2017, India and Pakistan mark 70 years since Independence and Canada 150 since Confederation. Decolonisation was accompanied by exclusions from national imaginings, rooted in the economic, cultural and political imperatives of British colonialism, including its territorial claims, cartographic revisions, power hierarchies and divide-and-rule policies. These exclusions were evinced in the bloodshed of Partition’s communal rioting, with its now iconic images of refugees fleeing across the newly created Indo-Pakistani border, and the violent displacement of Indigenous peoples by European “settler” societies such as those of Canada. In his Introduction in this issue, Joel Deshaye comments on Canada’s residential school system’s assimilative practices towards Indigenous children in the nineteenth century as reflected in 2016 poetry and criticism, engaging, in part directly, with the findings of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission report (2015) and the traumas resulting from such “immersive forms of colonial pedagogy” (Hutchings, 2016: 301).' (Introduction)