The Postcolonial Politics of Land

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Political theorists have long recognized the importance of political theories of land for the study of empire and colonization. Across a range of contexts, and in ways that have often crossed conventional divides between settler and dependent empires, political theorists have analyzed the conceptual frameworks that enabled the global transformation of land into property both in fact and law (Guha 1963; Tully 1993). In turn, more recent scholarship has emphasized the integral role of colonial ideologies of property in the formation of hierarchical social orders, imperial political subjectivities, and the state as a territorial enterprise (Bhandar 2018; Dahl 2018).

Despite its clear salience for anti- and postcolonial politics, however, the politics of land and borders has thus far been less systematically taken up as an object of study in postcolonial political theory. With the important exception of North American indigeneity (Coulthard 2014; Nichols 2020; Temin 2023), political theorists of empire have more often analyzed land as an object of accumulation than a set of relations capable of generating and sustaining distinctive forms of political contestation. This panel therefore proceeds from the premise that centering land as a category of inquiry is critical for efforts to “re-materialize” the study of empire, its afterlives both methodologically and conceptually, as well as the postcolonial proposals that respond to it (Ince 2020). Methodologically, focusing on the politics of land loosens the hold of elite textual production as a privileged site for the study of postcolonial politics. Conceptually, focusing on contests over land illuminates the diverse repertoires of political action through which postcolonial political actors have sought to unmake (neo)colonial forms of political economy and representation.

The participants on this panel take up these themes across different geographies, formations, and temporalities of decolonization. Each asks: How has land functioned as a nexus for the articulation of popular conceptions of postcolonial freedom? What epistemologies, imaginaries, and practices have grounded the efforts of anticolonial actors to resist contemporary forms of dispossession while evading logics of appropriation and possessiveness? And through what relations of agonism or solidarity do contests over land’s meaning and uses envision the democratization or renewal of postcolonial societies and polities?

Sub Unit

• Division 2: Foundations of Political Theory

Individual Presentations

• Frontiers of Emancipation: Legacies of Abolition in International Politics - Owen Rhys Brown, Scripps College; Arturo Chang, University of Toronto

• Disorientation to Earth and World: Amin, Postcolonial Pessimism & the Political - Alexia R Alkadi-Barbaro, Cornell University

• “Is Slavery Again”: Seeing State Capitalism in the Postcolonial Caribbean - Joy Wang, University of Chicago

• Keeping Yasuní Oil in the Ground: Contesting Epistemic Extractivism in the Amazon - Angelica Maria Bernal, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Chair

• Arturo Chang University of Toronto

Discussant

• Anuja Bose University of Minnesota