Title By Registration: instituting modern property law and creating racial value in the settler colony

The transformation in prevailing conceptualizations of property and the drive to render land as fungible as possible, the desire to commoditize land that had been pursued in earnest since the seventeenth century in England, was realized in the space of the settler colony decades before it would be implemented in the United Kingdom. The author explores how the commodity logic of abstraction that subtended new property logics during this time, reflected in the Torrens system of title by registration, was accompanied by a racial logic of abstraction that rendered the land of the Native, or Savage vacant and ripe for appropriation. By way of conclusion, the author speculates on the ways in which the imposition of English property law in the settler colony influenced the development of modern property law in England

Status as Property: Identity, Land and the Dispossession of First Nations Women in Canada

In the mid to late nineteenth century, as English and French settlers were in the process of consolidating their colonial Dominion over vast First Nations’ territories in the form of a Canadian federal state, the government enacted legislation to create the juridical category of the Indian. Binding together identity with access to land, Indian status and the Indian reserve would come irrevocably to define and regulate the lives of First Nations people in Canada from the mid-nineteenth century until the present. The creation of the “Indian” as a juridical category, along with the Indian reserve as a space of domination, marks a specific historical conjuncture—one in which identity (or indeed, subjectivity itself) and property relations were bound to one another, creating an apparatus [2] of colonial knowledge and governance that structures the ongoing dispossession of First Nations women

Registering Interests: Modern Methods of Valuing Labour, Land and Life

Beginning with some reflections on the audit-driven nature of contemporary academe, this chapter aims to explore forms of marginalisation and exclusion that modern methods of evaluation both produce and obscure. Here, I explore concepts of value and methods of evaluation that were utilised to create property interests in land and life insurance in the mid- to late nineteenth-century in the context of the British Empire. The Torrens system of title by registration, and the creation of the first state-wide system of registration for life insurance policies by Elizur Wright both emerge in 1858. While the commodification of land and life may seem to bear no relation to one another, I argue that they share a conceptual logic. While commodity-visions of land and life appear to be disaggregated by the 19th century, the methods of valuation employed in the propertisation of land and life both rely on techniques of valuation rooted in a turn to ‘scientific’ methods, and furthermore, reflect a racialist humanism that persists in producing and valuing whiteness over the lives of people of colour

Representing Palestinian dispossession: land, property, and photography in the settler colony

This article explores the centrality of property and dispossession to the operations of settler colonialism in Israel/Palestine through the prism of Edward Said and Jean Mohr's collaborative photographic essay After the Last Sky. Drawing on the way in which Said directs our attention to the meanings of land, place, and exile within Palestinian life and resistance, and putting his writing in dialogue with recent photographic projects that focus on Palestinian dispossession, the article brings these theoretical perspectives to bear on the present reality of the dispossession of Palestinian Bedouin in the Naqab village of Al-Araqib

Some Reflections on BDS and Feminist Political Solidarity

The main theme that I address in this paper is the boycott as a form of political solidarity. Recalling one of the primary objectives of Black and Third World feminist activists and scholars, I explore how BDS is one of the primary ways of building solidarity with Palestinians living under occupation. The logic of BDS is that of a unified, anti-racist and anti-colonial politics, which counters the logic of the Oslo Accords, one of fragmentation along multiple axes