Work · Indigenous Philosophies
The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty
Essays arguing that settler nations such as Australia and the United States are built on a “possessive logic” in which land, the nation and whiteness itself are treated as white property – a logic that denies Indigenous sovereignty.
Introduction
The book collects and develops essays Moreton-Robinson had written since the late 1990s and appeared in 2015 in the Indigenous Americas series of the University of Minnesota Press, in which Glen Coulthard’s “Red Skin, White Masks” had also been published. Its central concept is the “possessive logic” of patriarchal white sovereignty: settler nations constitute themselves by taking possession of Indigenous land and then treat the nation, its institutions and whiteness itself as white property. Case studies range from the High Court’s rejection of the Yorta Yorta native title claim to the figure of the lifesaver on Australian beaches and to whiteness studies in the United States, which in Moreton-Robinson’s view focused on slavery and immigration and overlooked Indigenous dispossession. The book received a prize of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association in 2016.
More works by Aileen Moreton-Robinson
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