Colonial Lives of Property

Colonial Lives of Property is a study of how modern property law has shaped racial capitalism across borders.

Brenna Bhandar, a critical legal scholar working on unceded First Nations territories at the University of British Columbia, has examined the continuous forms of settler colonialism in Ireland, Canada, Australia, South Africa and Israel-Palestine.

Her book demonstrates both the specificity of these contexts and traces the relationships between them. Across them, she locates racial regimes of ownership: systems of property rooted in the appropriation of land, and dependent on notions of European racial superiority and legal narratives which equate civilisation with English concepts of property.

Bhandar argues a political imaginary of property and freedom is possible, and is located in recognising a multiplicity of land uses everywhere rather than the exclusive possession afforded by title.

If you have institutional access, you can download the book here.

ab_ solidarity x narrow margins action-reading group

This action-reading group had four explicit intentions:

• To unsettle the ownership model of property together, particularly in the English context, through and with our knowledge/experiences of property across transcolonial spaces;
• To co-create a written summary and/or creative project to make Bhandar’s findings accessible to a non-academic audience;
• To trace flows of dispossession, build solidarities between the dispossessed, and organise as part of a global struggle for land justice;
• To envision a shared political imaginary for collective liberation from private property infrastructures.

This group was open to all who want to do this work. We felt it was particularly vital as we witness the Israeli settler colonial project in Palestine. As the world archives an active genocide, we must sustain memory of our interconnected struggles and build a movement of political education for land justice.

It was organised by members of:

ab_ solidarity, an action-research network and an experiment in generating commons. We learn with and support one another. This reading group is not a space to perform authority but to think with a nuanced and dense text for the purpose of distributing knowledge and co-creating a political imaginary.

Narrow Margins, a research project in England and Wales partly influenced by Bhandar’s work. It sees trespass as a window into property relations, and seeks to demonstrate the authority of different groups caught between the formalisation of property and the criminalisation of trespass, with the aim of building solidarities between us all.

Ways to participate

The extent each of us can engage may vary from week to week, so below are some suggestions that support the intentions of this reading group. We’d like to aim to have multiple and varied people who have read the chapter in full so the conversation isn’t led by the same people, but otherwise, we hope these options can accommodate a variety of labour relations:

1. Read the chapter in full and bring in a selection/question/connection for the group, thinking with our purposes in mind;
2. Read a selected excerpt of the text and bring in a selection/question/connection for the group, thinking with our purposes in mind;