Theft Is Property!: Dispossession and Critical Theory (Radical Américas)

Drawing on Indigenous peoples' struggles against settler colonialism, Theft Is Property! reconstructs the concept of dispossession as a means of explaining how shifting configurations of law, property, race, and rights have functioned as modes of governance, both historically and in the present. Through close analysis of arguments by Indigenous scholars and activists from the nineteenth century to the present, Robert Nichols argues that dispossession has come to name a unique recursive process whereby systematic theft is the mechanism by which property relations are generated. In so doing, Nichols also brings long-standing debates in anarchist, Black radical, feminist, Marxist, and postcolonial thought into direct conversation with the frequently overlooked intellectual contributions of Indigenous peoples. "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 modeof critique and articulation of radical politics"-- Description de l'éditeur "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"-- Provided by publisher Contents 8 Acknowledgments 10 Introduction 12 1. That Sole and Despotic Dominion 27 2. Marx, after the Feast 63 3. Indigenous Structural Critique 96 4. Dilemmas of Self-Ownership, Rituals of Antiwill 127 Conclusion 155 Notes 172 Bibliography 214 Index 236 That Sole and Despotic Dominion: Two Lineages Marx, after the Feast Indigenous Structural Critique Dilemmas of Self-Ownership, Rituals of Antiwill