Urbanizing Frontiers

Tiffany Shellam:
Urbanizing Frontiers sheds much-needed light on the spatial mobility of the developing settler colonial city where ‘mutual, albeit uneven, interactions, of colonization and Indigenization were, for a short time part of the tenor of the early settler-colonial landscape’. Edmonds is truly interdisciplinary in her research and conceptualisation of these two sites and she makes an important contribution to the understanding of Australian and Canadian history, as well as the other discourses of colonialism, race and urban geography.

Jay Gitlin, Yale University:
This is an important book, a must read not only for scholars in Native studies, but for urban historians as well. Indeed, I found myself excitingly quoting from it and footnoting it while preparing a manuscript before I could sit down and systematically read it for the purposes of this review ... One of the strengths of this book, indeed, is Edmonds’ nuanced analysis of gender. We not only see indigenous women in a wide variety of roles in both places from oyster traders to victims of sexual abuse, we also see how critical gender was in the discursive construction of place

Coll Thrush, University of British Columbia:
Taking as her case studies Victoria on Canada’s west coast and Melbourne, Australia, Edmonds makes a compelling case for the ways in which urban and indigenous histories are deeply entwined..[with] insightful placements of the potlatch and the corroboree alongside the grid and the picturesque ... the urban stories she tells are rich, complex, and densely critical ... Urbanizing Frontiers is an outstanding contribution to the nascent literature on urban colonialism and indigenous peoples.

Edward Cavanagh, University of the Witwatersrand:

Edmonds argues for a redefinition of perhaps the most contested idea in settler colonial historiography: that of the frontier….and offers a devastating indictment of the urban biopolitics of settler colonialism and their effect on Indigenous society.

Fances Steel, University of Wollongong:

Urbanizing Frontiers is a fine example of comparative colonial history. This sort of history requires research in multiple locations often separated by vast distances, engagement with the historiographical contours of at least two countries, and a conceptual language to bridge them. ...[it shows] rich and compelling evidence or the insightful analysis which is developed with reference to postcolonial, feminist and spatial theory.... Urbanizing Frontiers is a sophisticated monograph, carefully crafted and impressive in scope. It deserves a wide readership in indigenous studies, colonial history, urban history and historical geography, while also making an important and timely contribution to both Australian and Canadian history.

Lisa-Anne Chilton, Department of History, University of Prince Edward Island:
This book makes an original and highly important contribution to the specific historiographies of Canada and Australia, as well as the broader literatures on colonialism, urban development, and race ... Transnational comparative analysis is an increasingly important approach to understanding the past, especially in the study of colonialism and settler-indigenous relations, and to my knowledge no other study with this scope and theoretical bent has been published.