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Law Critique (2011) 22:227249
DOI 10.1007/s10978-011-9089-y
Brenna Bhandar
Published online: 6 August 2011 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011
Abstract In this article the author traces the limits of the philosophy and politics of recognition as manifest in colonial settler contexts. Forms of property ownership and ways of being, sutured by the racial body, are contained by a restricted economy of owning, knowing and being. Bringing the concept of plasticity to bear on the relationship between the body, property and the colonial, the author illuminates the ways in which practices of ownership that exceed the restricted economy of recognition exhibit a temporal and spatial plasticity in the context of the Palestinian struggles over land in the West Bank.
Keywords Indigenous Land rights Ownership Palestine Plasticity
Post-colonial theory Property Recognition
Introduction
In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon (1967) analyses the impossibility of recognition in the colonial context. The colonial subject, so utterly saturated with the raciality1
1 Ferreira da Silva denes raciality as a tool of productive nomos, [which] constitutes an effective tool precisely because of the way its main signiersthe racial and the culturalprovide an account of human difference, an account in which particularity remains reducible and unsublatable, that is, one that would not dissipate into the unfolding of Spirit (Ferreira da Silva 2007, xl). I employ Ferreira da Silvas notion of raciality throughout in order to denote the complex web of philosophical concepts, scientic invention, and economic forces that produce raciality as a strategy deployed to create and sustain particular subjectivities that irredeemably exceed existing frameworks of cognisability.
* This formulation, which reects the relationship between ontology, epistemology and relations of ownership, was articulated by Fred Moten on 4 June 2010 at a seminar at Goldsmiths, University of London.
B. Bhandar (&)
School of Law, Queen Mary, University of London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected]
Plasticity and Post-Colonial Recognition: Owning, Knowing and Being*
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of blackness, could not engage in a struggle for recognition with colonisers as the conditions for a mutual struggle, namely, a space of opposition, were absent. The native subject, a creation of the settler, was (and remains) caught within relations of dispossession, alienation and ownership that do not allow, in the absence of a dramatic rupture, for mutual recognition....