Property and subaltern pasts

This chapter explores property's centrality to scholarly understandings of subaltern pasts. It approaches property not only as land possession but also as an ideal of self-mastery defined by temporally and spatially enclosed forms of subjectivity and agency. Given that subjugated and enslaved peoples have been (and frequently continue to be) denied property both as land and as bodily self-possession, property assumes a key role in political theories and organized practices of subaltern resistance, redress, and reparation. However, that conversion requires injury be translated into a framework of property that uncannily reproduces the epistemic violence that organized earlier dispossession. For instance, neo-Marxist approaches to subaltern resistance frequently interpret dispossession as a lack of access to material resources, a perspective beholden to secular ontologies of labour, land, and time. The chapter outlines the challenges that this slippage across scholarly paradigms and political categories introduces for the narration of subaltern pasts and futures. It ends by calling for greater attunement to fields of political practice that take aim not only at entrenched material hierarchies but also at the very ontological terms by which such hierarchies are interpreted and reproduced, within as well as beyond scholarly paradigms.