lectures

‘Indigeneity’ as a Framework for Collective Liberation

King's College London

October 28

Strand Building Room: S0.11 Strand Campus, Strand, London, WC2R 2LS

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Professor Mukti Lakhi Mangharam, Department of English, Rutgers University

From Israel to India to the United States, ethno-nationalist movements are appropriating the term ‘indigenous’ to justify their violence against those they define as ‘other.’ In the face of this violence, how do we forge a collective liberation for all, regardless of the color of one’s skin, one’s religion, or ethnicity? In this talk, I explore a counter-discourse of decolonization from the perspective of writers constructed as ‘indigenous’ through the colonial experience. These writers and activists define freedom as universal belonging expressed through local, reciprocal connections to the lands they inhabit rather than through allegiance to pre-determined identity categories or the nation state. Instead of seeing land as a commodity, these thinkers and writers ‘live’ the land. They understand property as embodied relationships of use, stewardship, and kinship available to all beings who inhabit that land. In the first part of this talk, I refer to the differing non-commodifying notions of property held by pre-capitalist Native Americans. I then turn to the Native American Land Back Movement and the Palestinian Al-Ard Movement as examples of movements that have harnessed these indigenous non-capitalist notions of land and property. These theorizations of universal belonging offer a counter-discourse of decolonization against the violence of the capitalist, ethno-nationalist nation state.

This event is sponsored by the Critical Race Studies and Global Englishes research strand, Department of English, King’s College London.