Dispossession in Relation to Place

In chapter two of Butler’s and Athanasiou’s Dispossession: The Performative in the Political, “The Logic of Dispossession” it becomes clear that dispossession can often be linked to physical place, particularly loss of ownership. “Colonial and racist assumptions have been historically mobilized to justify and naturalize the misrecognition, appropriation, and occupation of indigenous lands in colonial and post-colonial settler contexts” (pg. 10). The example of land disputes between Palestinian and Israeli forces are a clear cut example of Young’s cultural imperialism because the arbitrary law created assumes inequality and natural rights. A parallel example can be made with analysis to the colonization of the Americas because the distinctly Western ideal of property ownership—including fencing and agricultural “improvement”—was imposed on the natives, who had a seasonal and utilitarian view of land ownership (Cronon’s Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonist, and the Ecology of New England).

For “European colonies, property ownership was a prerequisite for proper political subjectivity and citizenship, but also at the same time, attached to race and gender requirements—that is, whiteness and maleness—the signified proper (and propertied) civilized” view of humanity (pg. 27). Essentially, the ownership of property legitimized citizenry and humanity. For the European colonists, however, exploitation didn’t stop at the land resources they depleted, but in people were exploited for labor and methodology to surviving (and even thriving) in various regions. “Colonial violence can work both ways, by depriving an indigenous population of their land, and yet restricting the mobility of that population to the very land they no longer own (pg. 23).

Slavery is perhaps the clearest and most concrete example of a non-being since the slave is perceptually powerless under threat of and the reality of violence, but non-beings exist in those who are marginalized without violence too. In the post-slavery civil rights contexts, this marginalization can be highlighted as “separate but equal.” In the example of Rosa Parks, such as suggested by the text, “self-identity carries the genealogical burden of a metaphysics of presence, but, at the same time, it is not determined by the burden of histories in which it has been entrenched” (pg. 17). In occupying a mental space of stubbornness, “staying in placed [required] movement, or displacement” of the mind from cultural norms (pg. 22). Even some former slaves claimed to have found a sense of free-will in the ownership of their own minds, despite their situational environment; they still were considered non-beings due to the physicality of their slavery, and due to this ever-present relatability to the external world we all maintain a certain level of dispossession.