Where the Nation Takes Place: Proprietary Regimes, Antistatism, and U.S. Settler Colonialism

On September 13, 2007, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples by a vote of 143 in favor to 4 against with 11 abstentions. Thirty years of coalition building and lobbying by the International Indian Treaty Council and indigenous groups worldwide and more than two decades of negotiation within the UN preceded the vote.1 The groundwork for the declaration arguably goes as far back as September 1923, when Cayuga chief Deskaheh traveled to Geneva on behalf of the Haudenosaunee (the Iroquois Confederacy) to petition the League of Nations about violations of international law by the United States and Canada. Conspicuous as the four dissenting votes in 2007 were Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States. Strident opposition by these countries suggests the substantial threat that indigenous rights claims continue to pose to the fictive coherence of settler nation-states, which have historically sought to render the persistence of nations within as a domestic concern without international implication. Indeed, settler colonialism in the United States has insinuated itself over time in such a way as to obscure the persistence of colonialism as anything other than a historical trace, as well as to ostensibly naturalize settlers by habitation and descent

Predatory Value: Economies of Dispossession and Disturbed Relationalities

This essay introduces and theorizes the central concerns of this special issue, “Economies of Dispossession: Indigeneity, Race, Capitalism.” Financialization, debt, and the accelerated concentration of wealth today work through social relations already configured and disposed by imperial conquest and racial capitalism. In the Americas broadly and the United States specifically, colonization and transatlantic slavery set in motion the dynamics and differential racialized valuations that continue to underwrite particular forms of subjection, property, commerce, and territoriality. The conception of economies of dispossession introduced in this essay draws attention to the overriding importance of rationalities of abstraction and commensurability for racial capitalism. The essay problematizes the ways in which dispossession is conventionally treated as a self-evident and circumscribed practice of unjust taking and subtractive action. Instead, working across the lethal confluences of imperial conquest and racial capitalist predation, this essay critically situates the logic of propriation that organizes and underwrites predatory value in the historical present. Against the commensurabilities and rationalities of debt and finance capitalism, conditioned through the proprietary logics of settler colonialism and racial capitalism, the essay gestures toward alternative frameworks for building collective capacities for what the authors describe as a grounded relationality

Race and Capitalism: Global Territories, Transnational Histories

In October 2017, the Institute on Inequality and Democracy at UCLA Luskin in partnership with the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture at the University of Chicago convened a symposium on the theme, “Race and Capitalism: Global Territories, Transnational Histories.” A part of the national Race and Capitalism project led by Michael Dawson and Megan Ming Francis, the symposium sought to highlight how the study of racial capitalism in the United States must be situated in the long history of global systems of colonialism, imperialism, and development. With this in mind, the program was organized around four key themes: diasporas of racial capitalism; the land question; imperialism and its limits; race, capitalism, and settler-colonialism. Bringing together scholars from many different institutions, the symposium was also a space for shared work across different disciplines in the social sciences and humanities. Writings and presentations by four scholars, Nathan Connolly, Keisha-Khan Perry, Allan Lumba, and Alyosha Goldstein, anchored a day of debate and dialogue. This collection provides a glimpse of their key provocations as well as of the questions and comments posed by invited interlocutors. It is not a culmination but instead a benchmark in the ongoing efforts to build collaborative scholarship concerned with race and capitalism. Central to our concerns has been the question of what this might mean for a new generation of curriculum and pedagogy and for the next generation of scholars, our graduate students. We hope that the conceptual and methodological frameworks and interrogations presented here are useful in the endeavor of speaking back to our disciplines and speaking across our disciplines

Contemporary Art and Multicultural Education

This volume is a sourcebook for educators that provides theoretical foundations, resources, primary texts and suggested readings, as well as lesson plans that use multicultural, contemporary art to explore topical subjects. The lessons are designed for high school students from diverse backgrounds. Includes numerous artists’ statements (in English and Spanish) and a list of arts and media organisations. Biographical notes. Annotated bibliography 13 p. 74 bibl. ref