Brenna Bhandar: The Racial Politics of Pre-Emption: Property, Power and Deputization

12 PM New York l 6 PM Vienna

The Center for Human Rights and the Arts presents a discussion with Brenna Bhandar, Associate Professor of Law at the University of British Columbia, moderated by Adam HajYahia.

Land dispossession in settler colonies was rooted in the assertion of colonial sovereignty, which empowered settlers to re-territorialize Indigenous lands and create a regime of private ownership. This talk explores the land law doctrine of pre-emption, which was a key modality of Indigenous land dispossession in British Columbia and throughout North America. It examines the nature of power that the state bestowed upon individual settlers to perform property even before they were bona fide owners. This particular land law doctrine elucidates the relationships between legality and illegality, and law and violence, in the making of racial regimes of ownership.

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