Other People's Country ─ Law, Water and Entitlement in Settler Colonial Sites

Other People’s Country thinks through the entangled objects of law – legislation, policies, institutions, treaties and so on – that ‘govern’ waters and that make bodies of water ‘lawful’ within settler colonial sites today. Informed by the theoretical interventions of cosmopolitics and political ecology, each opening up new approaches to questions of politics and ‘the political’, the chapters in this book locate these insights within material settler colonial ‘places’ rather than abstract structures of domination. A claim to water – whether by Indigenous peoples or settlers – is not simply a claim to a resource. It is a claim to knowledge and to the constitution of place and therefore, in the terms of Isabelle Stengers, to the continued constitution of the past, present and future of real worlds. Including contributions from the fields of anthropology, cultural studies, cultural geography, critical legal studies, and settler colonial studies, this collection not only engages with issues of law, water and entitlement in different national contexts – including Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand, New Caledonia and the USA – but also from diverse disciplinary and institutional contexts. This book was originally published as a special issue ofSettler Colonial Studies.

Timothy Neale is a research fellow in the Institute for Culture and Society at the Western Sydney University, Australia. His work focuses on environmental knowledges, environmental politics, and critical theory. He is the co-editor ofHistory, Power, Text: Cultural Studies and Indigenous Studies (2014).

Stephen Turner teaches in English, Drama and Writing Studies at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He writes on questions of settler colonialism and indigeneity, and has also published work with Sean Sturm on the university, pedagogy and social futures.