Brenna Bhandar: Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land and Racial Regimes of Property

Date01 September 2019
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/jols.12174
Published date01 September 2019
COLONIAL LIVES OF PROPERTY: LAW, LAND AND RACIAL REGIMES
OF PROPERTY by BRENNA BHANDAR
(Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2018, 280 pp., $26.95)
In their recent essay on `Theory' in a collection exploring Critical Terms for
the Study of Africa,
1
Slaughter and Wenzel provide a reading of the
Ghanaian novelist Ama Ata Aidoo's Our Sister Killjoy, and in particular this
passage: `The hours of the flight had been organised in such a way that they
passed over the bit of Africa left in their way in the dead hours of the night
. .. Good night Africa. Good morning Europe.'
2
Slaughter and Wenzel argue
that in this passage the authors evoke Hegel with an `artful overturning of his
canonised philosophical prejudices'.
3
Their purpose is to read the journey of
the main character, Sissie, from the dark of the continent into European light/
Enlightenment, leaving behind an Africa `enveloped in the dark mantle of
night'.
4
At the heart of Bhandar's excellent book are similar ways of seeing
from the `margins',
5
a task she describes as `positioning oneself as a legal
theorist on the margins of settled law' (p. 185).
Powerfully driving forward Bhandar's analysis is the idea of `racial
regimes of ownership'. Developing a theoretical framework that owes much
to Cheryl Harris's work on `Whiteness as Property',
6
Bhandar explicitly
reaches beyond this to argue that `racial subjects and modern property laws
are produced through one another in the colonial context' (p. 8). Bhandar
argues that ownership and control of property was not just dependent on race
in settler colonies: race `was and remains subtended by property logics' that
determine whose ways of holding and valuing land is worthy of legal
recognition and protection (p. 9). Bhandar explores notions of improvement
as central to this racial subjectivity, citing Ranajit Guha's history of property
in Bengal
7
as a reminder of England's long history as an improving landlord.
Ideologies of improvement developed first in Ireland are captured in the
justification, indeed injunction, provided by Sir John Davies, the English
Attorney-General for Ireland in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth
century, in a letter to the Earl of Salisbury in 1610, to the effect that the king
was `not only entitled by law' but `bound in conscience' to seize land and
enact the formal replacement of Irish land law by the English common law in
order to `reduce his people from barbarism to civility'. This because, in the
512
1 J. Slaughter and J. Wenzel, `Theory' in Critical Terms for the Study of Africa, eds. G.
Desai and A. Masquelier (2018) 21.
2 A.A. Aidoo, Our Sister Killjoy, or Reflections from a Black-Eyed Squint (1977) 10±11.
3 Slaughter and Wenzel, op. cit., n. 1, p. 303.
4 G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History (1956) 91.
5 A. van der Walt, Property in the Margins (2009).
6 C. Harris, `Whiteness as Property' (1993) 106 Harvard Law Rev. 1707.
7 R. Guha, A Rule of Property for Bengal: An Essay on the Idea of Permanent
Settlement (1996).
ß2019 The Author. Journal of Law and Society ß2019 Cardiff University Law School

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