Histories and Afterlives of Dispossession: Symposium on Robert Nichols’s Theft is Property! Dispossession and Critical Theory, Durham: Duke University Press, 2020

• Date: 01 June 2022
• Author: Adom Getachew,Brenna Bhandar,Robert Nichols,Sandy Grande
• Published date: 01 June 2022
• DOI: 10.1177/00905917211035087
• Subject Matter: Review Essay

Political Theory

2022, Vol. 50(3) 504 –528

© The Author(s) 2021

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Review Essay

Histories and Afterlives

of Dispossession:

Symposium on Robert

Nichols’s Theft is

Property! Dispossession

and Critical Theory,

Durham: Duke

University Press, 2020

Brenna Bhandar, Sandy Grande,

Adom Getachew, and Robert Nichols

DOI: 10.1177/00905917211035087

Dispossession and the Antiwill of Property

Brenna Bhandar

Allard Law Faculty, University of British Columbia, Canada

An erudite, nuanced, and politically incisive work, Robert Nichols moves

deftly in Theft is Property! through the interstices of political theory, critical

Indigenous studies, and the Black radical tradition, revealing points of con-

tact by recasting and reorienting enduring questions of dispossession and

alienation. Inverting Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s famous phrase, Nichols exca-

vates the processes by which acts of dispossession recursively bring into

being the legally and politically constituted relations that are recognized as

property interests in the same moment as they are extinguished. And this

recursivity has produced a fundamental paradox for those resisting their very

dispossession: “the language of property and possession now functions as a

dominant mode of political expression to the extent that it has become dif-

ficult to voice opposition to these processes without drawing upon the con-

ceptual and normative frameworks they have generated” (145). Nichols

meticulously analyzes this paradox throughout the book and bring s insights

of critical Indigenous studies and Black radical scholars to bear on his

1035087PTXXXX10.1177/00905917211035087Political TheoryReview Essay

book-review2021

Review Essay 505

reconsideration of a constellation of Marxist notions of dispossession and

attendant concepts—such as exploitation, alienation, and diremption—in

order to both acknowledge a seeming inevitability of this paradox and iden-

tify ways of thinking and acting beyond its limits.

An enduring challenge that lies at the core of scholarship and activism on

racialized dispossession is the gap—ontological and epistemic—between his-

tories of dispossession and their (intended) effects and the modalities of

accommodation, resistance, and refusal that confront them. Dispossession

operates as a process that constitutes relations of private ownership and sub-

jectivities of settler and native in the same moment that it attempts to erase and

eliminate ways of being that do not conform to the relations of ownership and

mastery it seeks to institute. But Nichols sees this process less as a tautology

than a movement that not only brings into being the set of relations necessary

for colonial settlement (for instance, racially based private property owner-

ship) but retrospectively circumscribes Indigenous relations to land within

these same terms, precisely in order to usurp and extinguish these rights.

The complex and variegated gap between processes of dispossession and

resistance to them is revealed by Nichols’ theorization of dispossession as a

recursive movement and is one filled with the making of meaning. It is not

simply that land is “turned into” property through the act of dispossession,

but also that colonial subjectivities of settler and native, and a political struc-

ture based on the rights and entitlements of white, property-owning subjects,

take root. As Nichols emphasizes, not only does this paradoxically retrospec-

tive movement bring forth the property right of Indigenous peoples, but dis-

possession does so with the primary objective of simultaneously extinguishing

that right of ownership and of negating the presumption of full personhood

that is conditional on the capacity to own. The afterlives of dispossession are

secured by, among other things, legislative acts that define and crystalize the

juridical status of people, place, and things. We may note how, following Eric

Williams, the enslaved only became objects of property, legally speaking, in

British law with the passing of acts to provide compensation to slave holders

at the moment that slavery was abolished.1 The legacies of a dispossession

that separates, alienates, misrecognizes, and negates Indigenous, Black, and

racialized subjects’ lifeworlds creates strictures with which those claiming

restitution and reparation are forced to contend.

One of the many significant theoretical interventions that Nichols makes

in his framing of histories and discourses of dispossession emerges out of his

persuasive engagement with both settler colonialism and the legacies of

1. Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North

Carolina, 2014).