Brenna Bhandar: The Racial Politics of Pre-Emption: Property, Power and Deputization
November 8, 2024, 12:00 pm – 2:00 pm
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.
Prior to joining the law faculty in 2021 as Associate Professor of Law at the University of British Columbia, Brenna Bhandar was a Reader in Law and Critical Theory at SOAS, University of London, and previously held faculty positions at Queen Mary School of Law, Kent Law School, and the University of Reading Law School. She has also held visiting appointments at L’École des hautes études en science sociales (Paris) and the Stellenbosch University Faculty of Law (South Africa). Professor Bhandar’s research and teaching lie within the fields of property law, critical theory, colonial legal history, and critical race feminism. She is the author or editor of 4 volumes, including Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership, published in 2018 with Duke University Press, and the co-authored book of interviews (with Rafeef Ziadah) Revolutionary Feminisms: Conversations on Collective Action and Radical Thought, published in 2020 with Verso. Her work has been translated into Catalan, Spanish, German, and Italian.
Moderated by Adam HajYahia, Center for Human Rights & the Arts, Bard College.
