SOAS Research Online

Abstract

Dispossession has long been a concept pervasive in the work of scholars and activistsseeking to describe, analyse and challenge racial capitalism. To be dispossessed of one’s home, land, territory, means of subsistence, history, language, and sense of self has been a defining experience of much of the world’s population in the modern era. The global reaches of imperialism have not been relegated to a distant past, but are a networked legacy that is instrumental in shaping contemporary forms of modernity. Yet the acceleration of dispossession, and the extension of its grasp in contemporary late capitalism has produced its own cultural logics, affects and ways of being, which we refer to as ‘cultures of dispossession’. By cultures of dispossession we seek to highlight the normalized practices of dispossession that cannot be singly located in an economic, social or legal register. Cultural forms and formations of dispossession reflect the uneven impact of several hundred years of capitalist accumulation, centralised through the agent of the possessive individual and its corollary, the subject (always-already) ontologically and politically dispossessed of the capacity to appropriate and own, to be self-determining. The racialised and gendered formations that constitute the primary focus of the essays herein, are not contingent but are constitutive of dispossession – as it unfolds across material, social, psychic and juridical fields. The essays taken as a whole chart the ways in which the geopolitical realities of territorial dispossession and displacement run acutely alongside cultural, psychic and affective forms of dispossession.