Dispossession as an analytical concept allows community formation beyond just the sonics.

In attempting to apprehend the difference that Indigenous dispossession makes to Marxist understandings of land, labor, accumulation, and property, Rob Nichols addresses what appears to be a contradiction outside of Indigenous studies: If the Earth cannot be owned, how can land be stolen from its rightful owners? He argues that, first, dispossession “transforms nonproprietary relations into proprietary ones” and that, second, the dispossessed “are figured as ‘original owners’ but only retroactively, that is, refracted backward through the process itself.”

As he elaborates, “It is thus not (only) about the transfer of property but the transformation into property.” Naming this process “recursive dispossession,” Nichols pinpoints why Indigenous lands, stolen into property and possession, are so difficult to apprehend outside the systems of property and possession. As he explains, recursive dispossession works through “transformation,” “transference,” and “retroactive attribution.” Indigenous peoples’ relations to land are transformed (from a relation of responsibility to a relation of rights) only so that land-as-a-property relation can be transferred or sold to settlers.

The act of selling belatedly names Indigenous peoples as “original owners.” Dispossession, Nichols demonstrates in Theft Is Property!, “produces what it presupposes.”13 This shift is important for rethinking how primitive accumulation was not a stage of capitalist development but is, in fact, ongoing and necessary for settler-state capital accumulation through its colonial relation.14 The shift is also important for theorizing and learning from Indigenous resistance: “The theory and practice of Indigenous anticolonialism, including Indigenous anticapitalism, is best understood as a struggle primarily Koshy, Cacho, Byrd, and Jefferson inspired by and oriented around the question of land—a struggle not only for land in the material sense, but also deeply informed by what the land as system of reciprocal relations and obligations can teach us about living our lives in relation to one another and the natural world in nondominating and nonexploitative terms—and less around our emergent status as ‘rightless proletarians.’”15 As Coulthard explains, to see capitalism as a colonial relation is not just to see capital accumulation through the lens of ongoing dispossession but also to see anticapitalist activism in unceded and occupied Indigenous lands beyond workers’ struggles—in other words, to see “indigenous land-based direct action” as fundamentally revolutionary and anticapitalist.16 For us, staging our analytic as colonial racial capitalism allows a centering of relations of racism, settler and franchise colonialisms, and capitalism across a variety of historical and geographical contexts and engages their relation to the persistence of violence, precarity, and inequality in capitalist modernity.

Our analytic of colonial racial capitalism brings together genealogies of decolonial, Indigenous, and Black radical critique to explore how colonization and imperialism partitioned the globe into racially differentiated lands and peoples, naturalizing and justifying the expropriation of some bodies and lands for the benefit of others. As Chandan Reddy notes, “For the last three hundred years, Westernization and capitalism have refined and continuously expanded ‘society’ for the human community while abandoning for death any life whose first and primary crime has been its mere existence—that is, whose crime is that it exists without value or meaning for westernized-man.”

The essays in this volume move across a range of contexts, from the strategies of Indigenous dispossession encoded in legal definitions of the corporation and the tribe, to the historical erasure of the colonial violence of the Mexican-American War in public memorials, to the cognitive mapping of nuclear wastelands of colonial modernity located on Indigenous lands and in the global South, to mechanisms of debt and development as race-neutral means of asset-stripping Black communities, to the colonial legacies shaping the Vietnamese state’s protection of natural resources in the mining sector against Western and Chinese investors. The analyses link the logics and violences of domination and dispossession to interconnections among colonialism, racial capitalism, and formations of social difference. As they construct new links across fields, extend the analytic to unforeseen situations, and direct it toward new materialities, these essays open up possibilities for solidarity, action, and reflection that work against processes of violent partition and repartition through which colonial racial capitalism is reproduced. Colonial Racial Capitalism Racial capitalism is colonial capitalism, especially where settler and imperial thefts of land, the production of hierarchies of global space, and the expropriation of labor occur by means of recursive processes that require possession and rights in order to produce dispossession and rightlessness.

As Jodi Melamed observes, “Capital can only be capital when it is accumulating, and it can only accumulate by producing and moving through relations of severe inequality among human groups—capitalists with the means of production/workers without the means of subsistence, creditors/debtors, conquerors of land made property/the dispossessed and removed.”18 Thus, although liberal multiculturalism premised on antiBlack settler colonial expropriation now promises inclusion and equality through rights-based forms of administrative rule, colonial racial capitalism depends upon a simultaneous violent disenfranchisement, dispossession, and removal of certain bodies, subjectivities, and possible collectivities to secure and maintain speculative financialization. In the context of US and Canadian settler colonial societies, the ever-expanding logic of accumulation through dispossession depends upon colonial relations with Indigenous peoples as its condition of possibility, and as Joanne Barker observes, “In a state whose capitalism is always already reaching out globally, of course Indigenous peoples cannot have equal or commensurate claims to any lands and resources that might compete with corporateas-the-government’s interests to expand, extract, and profit some more. Of course.”19 This analytic of colonial racial capitalism therefore intervenes in and refracts a broader re-theorization of the relationship between capitalism and violence