The White Possessive

Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty

Aileen Moreton-Robinson author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:University of Minnesota Press

Published:15th May '15

Should be back in stock very soon

This paperback is available in another edition too:

The White Possessive cover

The White Possessive explores the links between race, sovereignty, and possession through themes of property: owning property, being property, and becoming propertyless. Focusing on the Australian Aboriginal context, Aileen Moreton-Robinson questions current race theory in the first world and its preoccupation with foregrounding slavery and migration. The nation, she argues, is socially and culturally constructed as a white possession.

Moreton-Robinson reveals how the core values of Australian national identity continue to have their roots in Britishness and colonization, built on the disavowal of Indigenous sovereignty. Whiteness studies literature is central to Moreton-Robinson’s reasoning, and she shows how blackness works as a white epistemological tool that bolsters the social production of whiteness—displacing Indigenous sovereignties and rendering them invisible in a civil rights discourse, thereby sidestepping thorny issues of settler colonialism.

Throughout this critical examination Moreton-Robinson proposes a bold new agenda for critical Indigenous studies, one that involves deeper analysis of how the prerogatives of white possession function within the role of disciplines.

"Aileen Moreton-Robinson brilliantly shows how systematically identifying whiteness with possession and dispossession deserves foregrounding in Indigenous studies."—David Roediger, University of Kansas, author of Seizing Freedom: Slave Emancipation and Liberty for All


"The White Possessive showcases the unique intellectual contribution of Aileen Moreton-Robinson, both within Australia and internationally. Prising apart concepts of race, ethnicity, and cultural difference, her book makes visible and accountable to patriarchal white subject of possession that subtends them."—The International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies

"Moreton-Robinson provides her readers with an indispensable theoretical analysis with which they can (re)think the way in which the possessive logics of whiteness structure racialised populations, particularly Indigenous subjects, experiences of (non)belonging and displacement in contemporary settler colonial life."—Sociology

"Most of the essays in the volume are on Australian Indigenous issues, but have relevance globally. This book provides many thought-provoking insights that could help bridge divides between scholars of indigeneity and those of whiteness."—Tribal College Journal

"Moreton-Robinson provides important conceptual tools to think through how we interpret and contest settler sovereignty today and into the future."—Antipode

  • Winner of The White Possessive 2016

ISBN: 9780816692163

Dimensions: 216mm x 140mm x 38mm

Weight: unknown

272 pages