Theft is property!
Subtitle: dispossession and critical theory
By: Robert Nichols
Series: Radical Américas; Radical Américas
Published: 2020
Language: eng
Number of pages: 233
ISBN-13: 9781478006732; 9781478006084; 9781478007500
Subjects: Claims; Land tenure; Indians of North America; Legal status, laws; Indigenous peoples
Description: "In THEFT IS PROPERTY! Robert Nichols develops the concept of "recursive dispossession" to describe the critical bind that indigenous activists face when seeking justice for the appropriation of their land: they simultaneously claim that their land was stolen by Anglo settlers, but also that territoriality and property ownership are themselves settler concepts. Putting indigenous thought into conversation with Marxist theory, Nichols argues that property relations under settler colonialism are built upon a structural form of negation, wherein some groups must be alienated from the very property that is being created. Thus, theft precedes and generates property, rather than vice versa, and indigenous claims of retroactive "original ownership" are not contradictory or logically flawed, but rather, gesture back to this very dynamic. By looking at dispossession as a unique historical process in the context of colonialism, Nichols shows how contemporary indigenous struggles have always already produced their own mode of critique and articulation of radical politics"--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: That Sole and Despotic Dominion: Two Lineages; title: Marx, after the Feast; title: Indigenous Structural Critique; title: Dilemmas of Self-Ownership, Rituals of Antiwill