Charles Taylor Book Award Honorable Mention 2021: Robert Nichols, for Theft is Property! Dispossession and Critical Theory

Honorable Mention: Robert Nichols, University of Minnesota, for Theft is Property! Dispossession and Critical Theory (Duke University Press)

Robert Nichols’ Theft is Property! is a play on Proudhon’s Property is Theft! , which Karl Marx famously criticized. Theft, as a violation of property, necessarily assumed the existence of property. Nichols, in the spirit of Marx, makes the case for understanding dispossession as a central term of critical theory in which property is not presumed but made through the act of theft. Focusing on Indigenous people’s struggles against settler colonial rule, Theft is Property! is at once a genealogy of dispossession and an effort to highlight and engage with Indigenous scholarship and activist work from the nineteenth century to the present. His brilliant insight is extraordinarily generative for our thinking: Indigenous dispossession is a “recursive process” in which the proprietary claims of settlers produce the conditions through which Indigenous subjects are deprived of something they never claimed to own. Interpretivists can learn a great deal from the ways in which Nichols’ privileges the voices and intellectual contributions of Indigenous peoples, putting them into conversation with Marxist critics of capitalism, feminist theorists, critical race theorists, and post-colonial thinkers. This deployment gives Nichols the leverage to produce his compelling account of the ways in which property relations are generated through systematic theft.

Selection Committee:

Lisa Wedeen, chair (University of Chicago)

Phillip Ayoub (Occidental College)

Juliet Williams (UCLA)