Reciprocal Repossession: Property as Land in Urban Australia

Abstract

Repossession of land by Indigenous people is commonly understood as a legal act that unfolds within the confines of state apparatuses. But for many Indigenous urbanites, legal repossession is both impossible and irrelevant due to their histories of dispossession and dislocation. Moreover, while land repossession in Australia is predominantly non-urban, I demonstrate that land is also reclaimed within cities. Urban repossession of land, considered here as reciprocal rather than legal, challenges the model of private ownership by asserting a territorially transferable relationship to property as land. The order of property entrenches Indigenous people's dispossession by demanding immobility as precondition to ownership and rendering Indigenous urbanites all "too mobile". Against this framing and the liquidation of their lands as capital, Indigenous people practice reciprocal forms of repossession that challenge both liberal and traditional meanings of ownership. This helps retrieve urban Indigenous subjectivities while compelling partial relinquishment of non-Indigenous properties.

Racialized geographies of home: Property, unhoming and other possible futures

“…Bhandar (2018: 12) conceptualises a reciprocal relationship between property and race in terms of ‘racial regimes of ownership’ involving networks of political, economic and juridical practices that ‘condense’ into domination over social groups. Read with property, moreover, racial capitalism’s regimes of exploitation, expropriation and expulsion (Bhattacharyya, 2018: 37) are understood to ‘touch at the core of one’s possession, namely the ownership of a recognised, sovereign self’ (Blatman-Thomas, 2019: 1397; 1404). Roy (2017: 9) describes this as ‘foundational dispossession—the subject whose claims to personhood are tenuous and whose claims to property are thus always a lived experience of loss’.…”

“…Resistance to unhoming reimagines propertied landscapes; it might reconfigure propertied landscapes. Blatman-Thomas (2019: 1410) work provides ideas for conceptualising how racialized subjects practise these kinds of homemaking. Writing on Australian settler colonialism, Blatman-Thomas (2019) conceptualises how Indigenous people practise ‘reciprocal repossession’.…”

“…Blatman-Thomas (2019: 1410) work provides ideas for conceptualising how racialized subjects practise these kinds of homemaking. Writing on Australian settler colonialism, Blatman-Thomas (2019) conceptualises how Indigenous people practise ‘reciprocal repossession’. This is not legal repossession and indeed challenges the liberal ownership model by invoking property as land; Indigenous people’s reciprocal repossessions, rather, are complex ‘hybrid performances’ (1406) which ‘hold up’ Indigenous people in propertied landscapes.…”

Political geographical perspectives on settler colonialism

“…Rutland (, p. 1) situates urban planning as a “world‐altering instrument of power and race,” showing how settlement and planning practices are predicated on large‐scale violence against and displacement of indigenous peoples and other racialized populations and how their presence is erased from the historical record. This work is prompting reconsiderations about the empirical links between cities and empire and spurring efforts to retheorize the urban itself by locating indigeneity within it (Blatman‐Thomas, , ; Blatman‐Thomas & Porter, ; Huberman & Nasser, ; Hugill, ; Porter & Yiftachel, ; Tomiak, ).…”

The Original Sin: On displacement through renoviction in Sweden

“…However, as neocolonial researchers have taught us, property and land are the result of variegated and heavily contested models of private property that are embedded within historical power struggles. A case in point is the long history of dispossession of indigenous land, where repossession has been shown to operate within decidedly colonial regimes of recognition (Blatman-Thomas, 2019). Consequently, I am not calling for a grand solution to displacement; rather, I am aiming for nuanced and sensitive investigations that highlight and challenge the uneven geographies of power and exploitation that underpin a variety of contextually different contemporary urban processes.…”