Robert Nichols - Theft Is Property! : Dispossession and Critical Theory

This book was written in two very different locales; it bears the marks of both. It was initially conceived while I was serving as an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at the Humboldt Universitt zu Berlin (HU). I am especially grateful to Rahel Jaeggi for her generous support, to Martin Saar and Eva von Redecker for their friendship and intellectual acumen, and to the entire colloquium on practical philosophy at HU for the community they provided during my years in Berlin.

In the fall of 2015, I joined the Department of Political Science at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Since then, I have been enormously fortunate to work in a very supportive department. I owe particularly large debts to my two extraordinary political theory colleagues: Nancy Luxon and Joan Tronto. I also feel very lucky to work at an institution that takes Indigenous politics and scholarship so seriously. In 201718, I participated in a yearlong Sawyer Research Seminar on The Politics of Land, which gave me an opportunity to work with a truly interdisciplinary group of faculty members and graduate students, all of whom pushed the conversation in demanding and important ways. I continue to reflect on many of the questions raised that year and am grateful to you all for that experience.

I have presented aspects of this work at Columbia University; Humboldt Universitt zu Berlin; Goldsmiths, University of London; Ko UniversityIstanbul; McGill University; Pennsylvania State University; Yale University; Universitt Leipzig; University of Alberta; University of British Columbia; University of California, Santa Cruz; University of Cambridge; Universitt Mainz; University of Minnesota; at the SAVVY Contemporary Art Gallery in Berlin and Performing Arts Forum in St. Erme, France; and at the American Philosophical Association, the American Political Science Association, the Association for Political Theory, the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, and the Western Political Science Association. In the spring of 2018, Michele Span and Alice Ingold were kind enough to invite me to serve as visiting faculty at the cole des Hautes tudes in Paris. This came at the perfect time, as I was in the final stages of preparing my argument. Thank you as well to all of the graduate students who participated in the seminars. Financial support for this project has been provided by the McKnight Land-Grant Professorship at the University of Minnesota.

The ideas presented in this book are the result of extensive conversations with dozens of people, each of whom has made significant, positive contributions to its content. Thanks in particular to Phanuel Antwi, Banu Bargu, Joanne Barker, Brenna Bhandar, Glen Coulthard, Jaskiran Dhillon, Nick Estes, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Mishuana Goeman, Alyosha Goldstein, Juliana Hu Pegues, Ulas Ince, John Monroe, Jeani OBrien, K-Sue Park, Shiri Pasternak, William Clare Roberts, Audra Simpson, Jakeet Singh, Chlo Taylor, and James Tully. I would also like to acknowledge the labor of the Duke University Press staff, including the editors, proofreaders, and design team. Special thanks to Courtney Berger for her early faith in this project and to the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and corrections. Just as I was putting the finishing touches on this manuscript, I received a copy of Brenna Bhandars Colonial Lives of Property (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018). I did not have the opportunity to incorporate the insights of her book into my own but wish to flag the importance of her work in thinking through similar concerns as those that animate this book.

The person who has most sustained and supported me through this long process is Travis McEwen. Thank you so much, again and again.