Theft Is Property: Dispossession and Critical Theory by Robert Nichols

Abstract

Reviewed by: Theft Is Property: Dispossession and Critical Theory by Robert Nichols Caitlin Simmons Robert Nichols, Theft Is Property: Dispossession and Critical Theory. Durham: Duke UP, 2020. 248 pp. Cloth, $99.95; paper, $25.95; ebook, $14.99. While the concept of dispossession is considered often in ontological or historical contexts, Robert Nichols manages to combine the two seamlessly in Theft Is Property: Dispossession and Critical Theory. The text consists of rich historical anecdotes and detailed Marxist critique through which Nichols explores the use and misuse of "dispossession" as it relates to Indigenous communities. As Nichols states, his purpose is "to reconstruct dispossession as a category of critical theory, one that may mediate between critiques of capitalism and colonialism" (4). Nichols [End Page 195] centers on Indigenous resistance to colonialist dispossession and grapples with the seemingly contradictory status of Indigenous land possession and ownership. Because Indigenous communities do not share the same capitalist beliefs regarding land acquisition as their colonizers, they come to "have something they cannot use, except by alienating it to another" (8). Nichols's most important contribution is his coining of the term "recursive dispossession," a concept that names the process of retroactive property ownership that results only after a new right to possession has already been stolen, in an act of "property-generating theft." Chapter 1 details the lengthy history of dispossession by tracing the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Nichols explicates and differentiates among expropriation, confiscation, and eminent domain, all foundational concepts in our contemporary understanding of dispossession. Engaging with John Locke, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and Thomas Paine, Nichols critiques the anarchist slogan against sovereign power, "Property is Theft" by reversing it: "the concept of theft presupposes the existence of property" (26). Only through theft is possession attributed to Native communities. Chapter 2 examines Marxist philosophies of alienation, with short sections on accumulation, exploitation, labor, and land. During the transition to capitalism, individuals who were once self-sustaining became wage laborers, which, according to Nichols, is a moment of self-exploitation under the guise of personal choice: "laborers 'freely' contract into their own exploitation, experiencing this as an actualization of choice and free will" (63). Nichols then argues convincingly that the causal relationship between land dispossession and personal exploitation is underdetermined in Marx's work. Nichols contends in chapter 3 that because critical theory has focused on specific incidents or locations of historical dispossession, scholars have overlooked the macro-historical creation of a global market in land. Though the chapter remains in the realm of Hegelian and Marxist theory, Nichols also calls upon Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill to track the evolution of alienation and the internal division of society via class. He calls attention to the consequences of focusing exclusively on [End Page 196] self-alienation at the expense of class division: "focus on how we dominate ourselves comes to elide concern for how we dominate each other" (96). The second half of the chapter considers Indigenous acts of counterdispossession in accommodationist, traditionalist, and syncretic forms. Here, Nichols contends that the political category of Indigeneity and assertion of "original ownership" have appeared belatedly and only as modes of resistance to colonialist pressure. In an unexpected and fascinating turn, Nichols concludes the text with a focus on the Black feminist philosophies of Saidiya Hartman and Hortense Spillers along with the concept of "antiwill" as he shifts interest from the dispossession of land to that of the body, self, and person. Nichols relies heavily on Orlando Patterson's definitions of "social death" and "natal alienation" to consider the relationship between dispossession through slavery and self-alienation in the capitalist market. He concludes the chapter with the paradoxical effects of attaining freedom or "self-ownership" in both Native and Black subjects. Whereas self-ownership defines personal freedom under capital, it is actually what Patricia Williams refers to as antiwill, or a kind of voluntary servitude: for Blacks, freedom incurred new debts, while for Indigenous communities, self-ownership, or full humanity, was granted only after the sacrifice of land via recursive dispossession. In the vein of cruel irony, "Black subjects are excised from the zone of personhood in and through the very same mechanism that ascribes...