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In this lecture, I explore the centrality of what she terms pre-emptive legal violence to colonial forms of dispossession and domination. I do this by examining the land law doctrine of pre-emption as it operated in North America in the latter half of the 19th century. As a doctrine that was central to the appropriation of Indigenous lands and the creation of markets in private property, pre-emption has received less critical attention than other legal justifications for colonialism, namely the doctrines of discovery and conquest. Addressing pre-emption, a colonial juridical innovation, compels us to challenge several aspects of the political divide between public and private forms of power and holds explanatory value for understanding contemporary political struggles for control over space and nation conceived of as property and territory.

More specifically, I aim to examine two aspects of pre-emption. First, through the metabolization of an early international law doctrine into domestic land law, pre-emption imported a legal form that constitutively binds public to private, and individual to state forms of sovereign power. Second, pre-emption presupposed a relationship between individual settlers and the nascent colonial state, which, within the theological and racial frameworks of colonial property relations is best described in the (philosophical-anthropological) language of kinship.

The land law of pre-emption assumed an a priori relation between individual white settlers and the colonial racial state, a kinship relation that was rooted in a theological and political-economic form of private property ownership and remains necessary for the maintenance of contemporary colonial land relations. Pre-emptive legal violence, I will argue, does not simply mark the origin of colonial relations and forms of rule, but continues to reproduce them.

SPEAKER
Brenna Bhandar is Associate Professor of Law at the University of British Columbia, located on the unceded and ancestral lands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam First Nation). She is author of Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land and Racial Regimes of Ownership (DUP: 2018), and co-editor (with Rafeef Ziadah) of Revolutionary Feminisms: Conversations on Collective Action and Radical Thought (Verso: 2020) and (with Alberto Toscano) Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation by Ruth Wilson Gilmore (Verso: 2022).