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Book Review: Mara Loveman, National Colors: Racial Classification and the State in Latin America

Moreton-Robinson pertinently challenges us to consider how the assumption of terra nullius both masks and justifies ‘the incarceration, removal, and extermination of Indigenous people’ (p. 29). Chapters 9, 10, 11 and 12 of the book propose a new research agenda for Critical Indigenous Studies scholarship. Underpinned by Michel Foucault’s writings on biopower, race and sovereignty, Moreton-Robinson argues for the need to conceptualise white settler colonial sovereignty as a regime of power, one that operates through discourses of rights and laws, and one that is embedded in the disciplines of political science, history and anthropology. In doing so, these chapters stress the productiveness of white power. A most poignant example occurs in Chapter 10, ‘Writing Off Sovereignty: The Discourse of Security and Patriarchal White Sovereignty’, where Moreton-Robinson examines Australian security discourse, arguing that national conceptualisations of refugees and asylum seekers, or ‘boat people’, as invaders, is rooted in a national white anxiety. An anxiety that, in denying the history of white invasion and Indigenous dispossession, functions to legally reaffirm white possession of the land, producing Muslim populations as an illegal existential threat to the white Australian nation. Thus, as Moreton-Robinson makes clear, the ‘deployment of the discourse of security is inextricably linked to an anxiety about dispossession shaped by a refusal of Indigenous sovereignty with clear roots in white supremacy’ (p. 154). The White Possessive argues for a systematic identifying of whiteness as central to logics of possession and dispossession in the modern world. Bringing together Indigenous Studies, Whiteness Studies, and legal, social and political theory, Moreton-Robinson’s method gives the book an impressive geopolitical scope and interdisciplinary relevance. There are moments when the book’s arguments could have benefited from a more sustained treatment of patriarchy, which is often named but under-theorised. Yet this omission should not distract from an otherwise comprehensive and compelling book. Indeed, Moreton-Robinson provides her readers with an indispensable theoretical analysis with which they can (re)think the ways in which the possessive logics of whiteness structure racialised populations, particularly Indigenous subjects, experiences of (non)belonging and displacement in contemporary settler colonial life.