In this essay, I examine the relationality between life and water in the context of its intercorporeal manifestations. Drawing on key aspects of Merleau-Pontian phenomenology, my concern is to reflect on water’s enfleshment of life and its complex ecologies of intercorporeity. These Merleau-Pontian key aspects, I note, are in close dialogue with a number of Indigenous cosmo-epistemologies that envisage the world as constituted by profound ecologies of intercorporeal relationality. The loci of my analysis are the Sonoran Desert and the lands (...) of the Tohono O’odham people, all situated within the ongoing violent relations of power unleashed by the forces of settler colonialism, including the partitioning of Indigenous nations by the Mexico–US border, the ecological devastation left in the wake of the construction of the Trump border wall and the increasingly fraught situation of undocumented migrants attempting to cross the US border. The bodies of water that I discuss in this essay disclose the cycles of life and death that turn on the presence and absence of water. These cycles are increasingly ensnared in aquapolitical regimes of governmentality that, in settler colonial contexts, unleash lethal effects that kill both bodies of water and the entities that depend on them for life. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that the Hindmarsh and Wik cases stand as crucial case studies that evidence the ongoing production of terra nullius within contemporary Australian contexts. They bring into focus the critical importance the signifiers of property, capitalist ‘productivity’ and legality within the settler-colonial state. Alongside notions of ‘civility,’ discourses surrounding ‘economic productivity’ and ‘equality before the law’ are consistently mobilised in these cases to assert white sovereignty. In contradistinction to the discourses that construct Indigenous people’s relation to (...) land as a singular and affective ‘affinity,’ media, political and legal texts script white Australian land uses such as farming and mining as ‘productive’ and necessary for economic prosperity. They are posited with ‘monetary’ output and juridical standing in order to produce the narrative that the continent was lawfully ‘settled’ by ‘illustrious’ white Australians. Moreover, these signifiers ramify within colonial law. Following these cases, the state amended the Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander Heritage Protection Act 1984 and the Native Title Act 1993 respectively. They ensured the material construction of the Hindmarsh Island Bridge and the revocation of specific Indigenous land rights in order to sustain the settler-colonial state’s claims to sovereignty. (shrink)

This article analyses the temporal effects of title registration and their relationship to race. It traces the move away from the retrospection of pre-registry common law conveyancing and toward the dynamic, future-oriented Torrens title registration system. The Torrens system, developed in early colonial Australia, enabled the production of ‘clean’, fresh titles that were independent of their predecessors. Through a process praised by legal commentators for ‘curing’ titles of their pasts, this system produces indefeasible titles behind its distinctive ‘curtain’ and ‘mirror’, (...) which function similarly to magicians’ smoke and mirrors by blocking particular realities from view. In the case of title registries, those realities are particular histories of and relationships with land, which will not be protected by property law and are thus made precarious. Building on interdisciplinary work which theorises time as a social tool, I argue that Torrens title registration produces a temporal order which enables land market coordination by rendering some relationships with land temporary and making others indefeasible. This ordering of relationships with land in turn has consequences for the human subjects who have those relationships, cutting futures short for some and guaranteeing permanence to others. Engaging with Renisa Mawani and other critical race theorists, I argue that the categories produced by Torrens title registration systems materialise as race. (shrink)