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As you may have noticed, our focus, so far, on the political, social, cultural, and psychological colonization of indigenous peoples has limited our discussion to invader colonies—colonies established among nonwhite peoples through the force of British arms, such as those established in India, Africa, the West Indies, South America, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia—for no one debates the inclusion of literature from these cultures in postcolonial literary studies. There is also a general consensus that the United States and Ireland are not postco‐ lonial nations, the first because it has been independent for so long and has itself colonized others, the second because it has long been an integral part of British culture (though some Irish people, especially in Northern Ireland, would surely disagree with this assessment, and many postcolonial critics cite the work of Irish poet W. B. Yeats as emblematic of anticolonialist nationalism). How‐ ever, there is much debate among postcolonial critics concerning whether or not the literature of white settler colonies—specifically, those established in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and southern Africa—should be included in the study of postcolonial literature. Those who argue that the term postcolonial should be reserved for Third and Fourth World writers observe that white settler cultures share a tremendous common ground with Britain, including race, language, and culture. These col‐ onies viewed Britain as the “mother country,” not as an imperial invader, and they were treated very differently from the nonwhite colonies Britain controlled. For example, white settler colonies were permitted a good deal of self-govern‐ ment and were granted Dominion status (political autonomy within the British Commonwealth) without having to take up arms to achieve it. Indeed, it was white settlers who, as Britain did elsewhere, subjugated nonwhite indigenous peoples and took their land and natural resources. In other words, these theo‐ rists argue, the inclusion of white settler cultures under the postcolonial rubric ignores the enormous difference race has played in the history of colonization and continues to play today in the racist attitudes that keep Third and Fourth World peoples economically oppressed. On the other hand, theorists who believe white settler cultures should be included under the rubric postcolonial argue that the foundational concept of postcolonial criticism is anticolonial resistance, and the literatures of white settler cultures have a good deal to teach us about the complexities of anticolonial resistance because their own resistance to cultural obliteration by an overwhelming British cultural presence has occurred without the help of a clear distinction between colonized and colonizer, a distinction that nonwhite invader colonies have been able to count on. In other words, white colonial subjects experience—in a sub‐ tler, less clearly demarcated form—the same double consciousness experienced