Unsettled

Unsettled
Erin Manning

 Explores what it means to be claimed, not just by blood, but by history, land, and the fragile web of human connection.

To belong is never a simple matter. For Erin Manning, ancestry has always been more of an entanglement than a strict lineage: a collection of stories, fabulations, and echoes of the past. Unsettled is a deeply personal and philosophical exploration of ancestry, identity, and belonging, particularly within the context of Québec’s settler-colonial history and its complex relationship with Indigeneity.

Here Manning describes her relationship with a close friend, R., who has lived a life shaped by poverty, subsistence farming, and a profound connection with the land. When R.’s mother bequeaths him their family land, he is left to navigate the tensions of inheritance, loss, and belonging. In an attempt to connect to R.’s Indigenous background, Manning offers to trace his genealogy. Soon, questions of what it means to “bestow” Indigeneity from an ancestral perspective begin to loom. Manning explores and critiques the practice of usurping Indigeneity in Québec, where claims of Métis ancestry are often leveraged for social or political gain, ultimately reinforcing whiteness and colonial structures rather than dismantling them. Through the lens of personal relationships, historical analysis, and philosophical inquiry, Unsettled challenges conventional notions of ancestry, property, and identity, while advocating for relational belonging over bloodline essentialism.

“We humans need guiding narratives to name the world we want to become. Making a different world requires different stories. Erin Manning’s Unsettled steps beyond insatiable settler mythologies of self-making, beyond shame for their collective entitlement, and into the literal in-the-dirt work of uprooting white possessiveness.” – Kim TallBear, Professor of Indigenous Peoples, Technoscience, and Society at the University of Alberta

“Unsettled is a courageous and consequential work that will productively incite some readers and inspire others.  It leans into openings, agonies and engagements with identity fabulation, affording textual time and space to marginalized rural white people and the pretendian phenomenon alike. Manning has written an incisive, layered and extraordinary work demanded by some of the most complex ethical dilemmas, circulating in the back waters and elite spaces, that can be found in the sociality of our times. Some will find the pages useful to rip out and position under kindling as fire-starter. It will likely start other kinds of fires as well…” – Peter Kulchyski, Professor of Native Studies at the University of Manitoba

Bio: Erin Manning studies in the interstices of philosophy, aesthetics and politics, concerned, always, about alter-pedagogical and alter-economic practices. Recent monographs include The Minor Gesture (2016) and For a Pragmatics of the Useless (2020). 3e is the direction her current artistic research takes – an exploration of the transversality of the three ecologies, the social, the environmental and the conceptual. An iteration of 3e is a land-based project north of Montreal where living and learning is experimented. Legacies of SenseLab infuse the project, particularly the question of how collectivity is crafted in a more-than human encounter with worlds in the making.

Ordering Information
Available direct from Minor Compositions for the special price of £10 + shipping.

Advance pre-orders for the book will be taken during September-October 2025 (to be shipped in November). Anyone who pre-orders the book directly from Minor Compositions will be sent a special barcode free version of the book.

A digital version can freely be downloaded here: Unsettled.

178 pages, 4.25 x 7, paperback
UK: £17 / US: $23
ISBN 978-1-57027-440-4

Release to the book trade 20 March 2026