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SUMMARY:Cultures of dispossession: critical reflections on status\, rights
  and identities - Brenna Bhandar\, SOAS
DTSTART:20160426T160000Z
DTEND:20160426T174500Z
UID:TALK65625@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Pierre Bocquillon
DESCRIPTION:Abstract\n\nDispossession has long been a concept pervasive in
  the work of scholars and activists seeking to describe\, analyse and chal
 lenge racial capitalism. To be dispossessed of one’s home\, land\, terri
 tory\, means of subsistence\, history\, language\, and sense of self has b
 een a defining experience of much of the world’s population in the moder
 n era. The global reaches of imperialism have not been relegated to a dist
 ant past\, but are a networked legacy instrumental to shaping contemporary
  forms of modernity. Yet the acceleration of dispossession\, and the exten
 sion of its grasp in contemporary late capitalism have produced its own cu
 ltural logics\, affects and ways of being\, which we refer to here as “c
 ultures of dispossession”. With this formulation we seek to highlight th
 e normalised practices of dispossession that cannot be singly located in a
 n economic\, social or legal register. Cultural formations of dispossessio
 n reflect the uneven impact of several hundred years of capitalist accumul
 ation\, centralised through the agency of the possessive individual and it
 s corollary\, the subject (always-already) ontologically and politically d
 ispossessed of the capacity to appropriate and own\, to be self-determinin
 g. The racialised and gendered formations that constitute the primary focu
 s of the essays collected in this volume are not contingent but constituti
 ve of dispossession – as it unfolds across material\, social\, psychic a
 nd juridical fields. Taken as a whole\, the essays chart some of the ways 
 in which the geopolitical realities of territorial dispossession and displ
 acement are intertwined with cultural\, psychic and affective forms of dis
 possession.\n\nBio\n\nBrenna Bhandar is Senior Lecturer in Law\, SOAS. Her
  current research project explores the relationship between racial formati
 ons and modern property law in settler colonial contexts. She examines the
  articulation of race and ownership as a conjuncture that emerges through 
 the appropriation of Indigenous lands\, drawing on archival sources and in
 terviews in Canada\, Australia and Israel/Palestine. She is co-editor (wit
 h Jon Goldberg-Hiller) of the book Plastic Materialities: Legality\, Polit
 ics and Metamorphosis in the work of Catherine Malabou (Duke University Pr
 ess\, 2015). The contributions in this volume assess the political and phi
 losophical implications of Malabou's innovative combination of poststructu
 ralism and neuroscience across disciplines. She is also co-editor of the f
 orthcoming special issue of Darkmatter Journal\, "Reflections on Disposses
 sion: Critical Feminisms" (with Davina Bhandar).
LOCATION:Room 4\, Mill Lane Lecture Rooms\, 8 Mill Lane\, Cambridge
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