Brenna Bhandar

Plastic materialities : politics, legality, and metamorphosis in the work of Catherine Malabou

Catherine Malabous concept of plasticity has influenced and inspired scholars from across disciplines. The contributors to Plastic Materialities-whose disciplines include political philosophy, critical legal studies, social theory, literature, and philosophy-use Malabous innovative combination of post-structuralism and neuroscience to evaluate the political implications of her work. They address, among other things, subjectivity, science, war, the malleability of sexuality, neoliberalism and economic theory, indigenous and racial politics, and the relationship between the human and non-human. Plastic Materialities also includes three essays by Malabou and an interview with her, all of which bring her work into conversation with issues of sovereignty, justice, and social order for the first time.

Possession, occupation and registration: recombinant ownership in the settler colony

No other aspect of property so infuses our social, psycho-symbolic, cultural and political realms as the idea of possession. Whether considering modern theories of subjectivity, relationships between people (from labour relations to intimate ones of love and affection), or indeed, what it means to own something, possession – as an amalgam of both spirit and fact – structures our thought, emotions and actions. The idea of self-ownership, whether in a Lockean vein or as a dialectical struggle for mastery over ones self in relation to an other, persists across a wide spectrum of philosophical discourses on subjectivity; particularly among those in which propriety and impropriety, appropriation and dispossession, and forms of status are acknowledged as central aspects of contemporary social relations and political subjectivity.

Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership

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.

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

ABSTRACT 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 Mohrs 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.