Racialization and Racism

Racial regimes of property: Introduction to the special issue

The papers in this special issue, the outcome of sessions organized at the 2019 annual meeting of the American Association of Geographers, start from Bhandar’s (2018) notion of “racial regimes of ownership” to theorize how property depends on historical and renewed modes of racial and other forms of differentiation. Yet, they also seek to move beyond the settler-colonial contexts profiled in Bhandar’s book, and beyond the category of “ownership” to include variegated regimes of access and tenure (e.g. rent and tenancy). In addition, the authors seek to trouble the rigidity of relations of domination so often portrayed in critical property studies, instead bringing to light the tenuousness, ambiguity, and messiness of the property-racial matrix, and the forms of resistance and refusal that render imaginative futures beyond property. It is one of the chief contentions of this special issue that while they may seem hegemonic and fixed, racial regimes of property are inherently unstable, constantly subject to undoing through and beyond their own internal logics. Marshalling critical property studies across disciplines and original empirical data, these papers extend scholarly conversations along three analytical axes: property’s (i) logics, (ii) materialities, and (iii) refusals.

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Volume 40 Issue 2

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Though not an exhaustive list, these are many of the main areas we cover.