Sovereign Subjects

Author: Aileen Moreton-Robinson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000247392
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 199

Book Description
Indigenous rights in Australia are at a crossroads. Over the past decade, neo-liberal governments have reasserted their claim to land in Australia, and refuse to either negotiate with the Indigenous owners or to make amends for the damage done by dispossession. Many Indigenous communities are in a parlous state, under threat both physically and culturally. In Sovereign Subjects some of Indigenous Australia's emerging and well-known critical thinkers examine the implications for Indigenous people of continuing to live in a state founded on invasion. They show how for Indigenous people, self-determination, welfare dependency, representation, cultural maintenance, history writing, reconciliation, land ownership and justice are all inextricably linked to the original act of dispossession by white settlers and the ongoing loss of sovereignty. At a time when the old left political agenda has run its course, and the new right is looking increasingly morally bankrupt, Sovereign Subjects sets a new rights agenda for Indigenous politics and Indigenous studies.

Subjects and Sovereign

Author: Hannah Weiss Muller
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190465816
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 345

Book Description
Subjects and Sovereigns reexamines the traditional bond between subject and sovereign and argues that this relationship endured as a powerful site for claims-making in the eighteenth-century British Empire.

Critically Sovereign

Author: Joanne Barker
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822373165
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 297

Book Description
Critically Sovereign traces the ways in which gender is inextricably a part of Indigenous politics and U.S. and Canadian imperialism and colonialism. The contributors show how gender, sexuality, and feminism work as co-productive forces of Native American and Indigenous sovereignty, self-determination, and epistemology. Several essays use a range of literary and legal texts to analyze the production of colonial space, the biopolitics of “Indianness,” and the collisions and collusions between queer theory and colonialism within Indigenous studies. Others address the U.S. government’s criminalization of traditional forms of Diné marriage and sexuality, the Iñupiat people's changing conceptions of masculinity as they embrace the processes of globalization, Hawai‘i’s same-sex marriage bill, and stories of Indigenous women falling in love with non-human beings such as animals, plants, and stars. Following the politics of gender, sexuality, and feminism across these diverse historical and cultural contexts, the contributors question and reframe the thinking about Indigenous knowledge, nationhood, citizenship, history, identity, belonging, and the possibilities for a decolonial future. Contributors. Jodi A. Byrd, Joanne Barker, Jennifer Nez Denetdale, Mishuana Goeman, J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, Melissa K. Nelson, Jessica Bissett Perea, Mark Rifkin

The White Possessive

Author: Aileen Moreton-Robinson
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452944598
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 327

Book Description
The White Possessive explores the links between race, sovereignty, and possession through themes of property: owning property, being property, and becoming propertyless. Focusing on the Australian Aboriginal context, Aileen Moreton-Robinson questions current race theory in the first world and its preoccupation with foregrounding slavery and migration. The nation, she argues, is socially and culturally constructed as a white possession. Moreton-Robinson reveals how the core values of Australian national identity continue to have their roots in Britishness and colonization, built on the disavowal of Indigenous sovereignty. Whiteness studies literature is central to Moreton-Robinson’s reasoning, and she shows how blackness works as a white epistemological tool that bolsters the social production of whiteness—displacing Indigenous sovereignties and rendering them invisible in a civil rights discourse, thereby sidestepping thorny issues of settler colonialism. Throughout this critical examination Moreton-Robinson proposes a bold new agenda for critical Indigenous studies, one that involves deeper analysis of how the prerogatives of white possession function within the role of disciplines.

The Subject of Sovereignty

Author: Gregory Feldman
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 180539097X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 226

Book Description
Seeking new forms of democracy, progressive politics raises a fundamental question: what is the alternative to the allegedly coherent, self-contained liberal subject that represents the project of modernity? Exploring the themes of nature, race, and the divine, this book identifies the more realistic alternative in the “relational subject”: a subject that is inseparable from the global field of relations through which it emerges and yet distinct from that field because it lives a life that no one else ever has. Recognizing ourselves as such subjects allows us not only to rethink politics, but, more profoundly, to envision sovereignty as the means by which we each rejuvenate ourselves and the polities we constitute with others.

Hobbes on Resistance

Author: Susanne Sreedhar
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139488309
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 193

Book Description
Hobbes's political theory has traditionally been taken to be an endorsement of state power and a prescription for unconditional obedience to the sovereign's will. In this book, Susanne Sreedhar develops a novel interpretation of Hobbes's theory of political obligation and explores important cases where Hobbes claims that subjects have a right to disobey and resist state power, even when their lives are not directly threatened. Drawing attention to this broader set of rights, her comprehensive analysis of Hobbes's account of political disobedience reveals a unified and coherent theory of resistance that has previously gone unnoticed and undefended. Her book will appeal to all who are interested in the nature and limits of political authority, the right of self-defense, the right of revolution, and the modern origins of these issues.

Sovereign Necropolis

Author: Trais Pearson
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501740164
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
By the 1890s, Siam (Thailand) was the last holdout against European imperialism in Southeast Asia. But the kingdom's exceptional status came with a substantial caveat: Bangkok, its bustling capital, was a port city that was subject to many of the same legal and fiscal constraints as other colonial treaty ports. Sovereign Necropolis offers new insight into turn-of-the-century Thai history by disinterring the forgotten stories of those who died "unnatural deaths" during this period and the work of the Siamese state to assert their rights in a pluralistic legal arena. Based on a neglected cache of inquest files compiled by the Siamese Ministry of the Capital, official correspondence, and newspaper accounts, Trais Pearson documents the piecemeal introduction of new forms of legal and medical concern for the dead. He reveals that the investigation of unnatural death demanded testimony from diverse strata of society: from the unlettered masses to the king himself. These cases raised questions about how to handle the dead—were they spirits to be placated or legal subjects whose deaths demanded compensation?—as well as questions about jurisdiction, rights, and liability. Exhuming the history of imperial politics, transnational commerce, technology, and expertise, Sovereign Necropolis demonstrates how the state's response to global flows transformed the nature of legal subjectivity and politics in lasting ways. A compelling exploration of the troubling lives of the dead in a cosmopolitan treaty port, the book is a notable contribution to the growing corpus of studies in science, law, and society in the non-Western world.

Sovereignty Experiments

Author: Alyssa M. Park
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501738372
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 307

Book Description
Sovereignty Experiments tells the story of how authorities in Korea, Russia, China, and Japan—through diplomatic negotiations, border regulations, legal categorization of subjects and aliens, and cultural policies—competed to control Korean migrants as they suddenly moved abroad by the thousands in the late nineteenth century. Alyssa M. Park argues that Korean migrants were essential to the process of establishing sovereignty across four states because they tested the limits of state power over territory and people in a borderland where authority had been long asserted but not necessarily enforced. Traveling from place to place, Koreans compelled statesmen to take notice of their movement and to experiment with various policies to govern it. Ultimately, states' efforts culminated in drastic measures, including the complete removal of Koreans on the Soviet side. As Park demonstrates, what resulted was the stark border regime that still stands between North Korea, Russia, and China today. Skillfully employing a rich base of archival sources from across the region, Sovereignty Experiments sets forth a new approach to the transnational history of Northeast Asia. By focusing on mobility and governance, Park illuminates why this critical intersection of Asia was contested, divided, and later reimagined as parts of distinct nations and empires. The result is a fresh interpretation of migration, identity, and state making at the crossroads of East Asia and Russia.

An Introduction to Namibian Law

Author: Amor, S.K.
Publisher: University of Namibia Press
ISBN: 9991642412
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 490

Book Description
The author of this book, Prof. S.K. Amor, is Acting Director of the Justice Training Centre and lecturer at the University of Namibia. The writing of this book was inspired mainly by the fact that, despite Namibia's independence in 1990, Namibian legal practitioners, academics and students lecturing and studying law at the University of Namibia (UNAM) still do not have a truly Namibian reference book. Instead, they rely heavily on legal literature from South Africa and other countries. An Introduction to Namibian Law is an attempt to bridge this gap by introducing law academics, lecturers and students to the most important aspects of Namibian law. It explains the origin of the country's law and looks at the various influences over the years. The book contains material covered in various UNAM courses, such as Jurisprudence, Introduction to Cases, Comparative Law, Constitutional and Administrative Law, Interpretation of Statutes, and Civil and Criminal Procedure. It also contains various extracts in support of legal arguments, in which legal concepts are illustrated and thoroughly explained, as well as sample legal forms. Full accounts of certain cases are included to give students of Namibian law a depth of understanding of how Namibian law has been applied over the years.

History of Political Theory: An Introduction

Author: George Klosko
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 019969544X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 583

Book Description
History of Political Theory: An Introduction is an engaging introduction to the main figures in the history of Western Political Theory and their most important works. The second volume traces the origin and development of liberal political theory, and so the foundations for contemporary views.