This book examines the performative life reconciliation and its discontents in settler societies. It explores the affective refoundings of the settler state and reimaginings of its alternatives and, in particular, the way the past is mobilized and reworked in the name of social transformation within a new global paradigm of reconciliation and the 'age of apology'. In search of a new emancipatory politics, the book takes particular account of Indigenous-led refutations or reworkings of consensus politics in public culture. Taking case studies from the USA, Australia, and Aotearoa New Zealand, it traces the prehistory of reconciliation's present in settler states, a critical and contested political process which is especially salient where formal decolonization cannot occur. The dynamic process of drawing on the past to forge new alliances and imagined futures is a crucial aspect of the political realm - one that we are jointly acting out together; and it is worked out from the affectiveand overlapping spaces of heart and horror.
