Abstract

The struggles of Indigenous peoples for political subjectivity, specifically in Canada but also more broadly, offer crucial challenges to ongoing debates within contemporary political theory. They especially challenge the framing of debates over issues of identity and difference, and the possibility of developing a more pluralistic understanding of political community. These challenges, I argue, demand a more sustained engagement with sovereignty, and with early-modern assumptions about what constitutes a properly political community expressed in claims about sovereignty. ;Drawing upon early-modern theorists such as Thomas Hobbes and Alexis de Tocqueville, I argue that modern political institutions and practices depend upon sovereignty as their crucial precondition. Sovereignty, in turn, is dependent upon the reproduction of a shared ground of ontological homogeneity---or identity---as the basis upon which disputes can be reconciled and order established. This claim to a necessary sovereignty has not only sustained a high degree of order and stability in the context of North America, but has also legitimated significant violences towards and exclusions of the original inhabitants of North America. Inasmuch as contemporary institutions and practices of politics have assumed and reinforced rather than problematized the necessities that underlie modern productions of sovereignty, they have reproduced a series of double binds for Indigenous political movements. While the work of those theorists who have struggled fiercely against the constraints of modern thought imposed by sovereignty, such as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, or against the treatment of Indigenous peoples enabled by modern thought, such as James Tully, productively engages challenges posed by Indigenous political movements, even these efforts remain constrained by the limits of political possibility produced by discourses and practices of sovereignty. ;The dissertation begins with an analysis of Hobbes, Tocqueville and the reproductions of sovereignty in the modern scholarly disciplines of international relations and anthropology. It then develops a critical readings of contemporary Indigenous politics in Canada and key texts by Tully and Deleuze-Guattari