Brenna Bhandar, School of Oriental and African Studies, has published Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership with Duke University Press. From the publisher:
"I am obsessed with the force and eloquence with which [Bhandar] analyzes the birth of private property and its ongoing devastating effects. This book is going to be precious to me and many other people, too." -Jordy Rosenberg
“Brenna Bhandar's enthralling book peels the veneer of property law from that which lies concealed beneath—the multiplicitous structures of dominance that define our contemporary settler-colonial world, all the way from Parramatta to Palestine. Here is a trenchant reassertion of the capacities of Marxist analysis to plumb dispossessions both historic and current, and to expose the entwined regimes of ownership and of racial hegemony that sustain them.” -Christopher Tomlins
“In this original study, Brenna Bhandar analyzes the constitutive role of colonialism in the development of modern property law and the modern legal subject. Bhandar's sophisticated comparative research on the political-economic imagination and legal infrastructure of settler colonialism is completely fascinating. And her stunning elaboration of what she names 'racial regimes of ownership' is utterly brilliant. A timely and essential book that will fundamentally change the way we think about race, property, and subjectivity.” -Avery F. Gordon
Further information is available here.
Praise for the book:In Colonial Lives of Property Brenna Bhandar examines how modern property law contributes to the formation of racial subjects in settler colonies and to the development of racial capitalism. Examining both historical cases and ongoing processes of settler colonialism in Canada, Australia, and Israel and Palestine, Bhandar shows how the colonial appropriation of indigenous lands depends upon ideologies of European racial superiority as well as upon legal narratives that equate civilized life with English concepts of property. In this way, property law legitimates and rationalizes settler colonial practices while it racializes those deemed unfit to own property. The solution to these enduring racial and economic inequities, Bhandar demonstrates, requires developing a new political imaginary of property in which freedom is connected to shared practices of use and community rather than individual possession.
"I am obsessed with the force and eloquence with which [Bhandar] analyzes the birth of private property and its ongoing devastating effects. This book is going to be precious to me and many other people, too." -Jordy Rosenberg
“Brenna Bhandar's enthralling book peels the veneer of property law from that which lies concealed beneath—the multiplicitous structures of dominance that define our contemporary settler-colonial world, all the way from Parramatta to Palestine. Here is a trenchant reassertion of the capacities of Marxist analysis to plumb dispossessions both historic and current, and to expose the entwined regimes of ownership and of racial hegemony that sustain them.” -Christopher Tomlins
“In this original study, Brenna Bhandar analyzes the constitutive role of colonialism in the development of modern property law and the modern legal subject. Bhandar's sophisticated comparative research on the political-economic imagination and legal infrastructure of settler colonialism is completely fascinating. And her stunning elaboration of what she names 'racial regimes of ownership' is utterly brilliant. A timely and essential book that will fundamentally change the way we think about race, property, and subjectivity.” -Avery F. Gordon
Further information is available here.
