Torrens Title: property, race and (infra)structures of feeling in the settler colony

Abstract

This article argues that property law can be understood as a key infrastructure of settler-colonial sovereignty. Rather than a simple importation of British law, the frontier mentality of the colonial outpost allowed for the implementation of a new legal framework for the allocation and registration of land. Taking the example of Torrens Title allows for an analysis of the ‘structures of feeling’ that are generated by, and that naturalise in turn, the possessive claim to property. We consider how the history of property as fungible commodity is entangled with the history of racialisation, and how Torrens Title shows the material and affective dimensions of settler law and of the long struggle to resist its illegal claim to sovereignty. We analyse the 2018 video essay Drawing Rights by Rachel O’Reilly, considering the troubled relationship between white possession and the unbroken sovereignty it denies, yet which remains a constant threat to the settler state. Her work articulates what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls ‘infrastructures of feeling’, which, we argue, describes the way anti-colonial consciousness can materialise against structures and attachments of settlement.