Full Description
The White Possessive explores the links between race, sovereignty, and possession through themes of property: owning property, being property, and becoming propertyless. Focusing on the Australian Aboriginal context, Aileen Moreton-Robinson questions current race theory in the first world and its preoccupation with foregrounding slavery and migration. The nation, she argues, is socially and culturally constructed as a white possession.
Moreton-Robinson reveals how the core values of Australian national identity continue to have their roots in Britishness and colonization, built on the disavowal of Indigenous sovereignty. Whiteness studies literature is central to Moreton-Robinson's reasoning, and she shows how blackness works as a white epistemological tool that bolsters the social production of whiteness-displacing Indigenous sovereignties and rendering them invisible in a civil rights discourse, thereby sidestepping thorny issues of settler colonialism.
Throughout this critical examination Moreton-Robinson proposes a bold new agenda for critical Indigenous studies, one that involves deeper analysis of how the prerogatives of white possession function within the role of disciplines.
Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: White Possession and Indigenous Sovereignty Matters
Part I. Owning Property
1. I Still Call Australia Home: Indigenous Belonging and Place in a Postcolonizing Society
2. The House That Jack Built: Britishness and White Possession
3. Bodies That Matter on the Beach
4. Writing Off Treaties: Possession in the U.S. Critical Whiteness Literature
Part II. Becoming Propertyless
5. Nullifying Native Title: A Possessive Investment in Whiteness
6. The High Court and the Yorta Yorta Decision
7. Leesa's Story: White Possession in the Workplace
8. The Legacy of Cook's Choice
Part III. Being Property
9. Toward a New Research Agenda: Foucault, Whiteness, and Sovereignty
10. Writing Off Sovereignty: The Discourse of Security and Patriarchal White Sovereignty
11. Imagining the Good Indigenous Citizen: Race War and the Pathology of White Sovereignty
12. Virtuous Racial States: White Sovereignty and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples
Afterword
Notes
Publication History
Index
