Brenna Bhandar

is Senior Lecturer in the School of Law at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and the author of Colonial Lives of Property:
Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership
(forthcoming, Duke University Press).

Orange Car Crash Fourteen Times

Possessive Nationalism: Race, Class and the Lifeworlds of Property

The current political moment, when grasped through the property logics discussed above, requires us to consider how ideologies of ownership, including expectations to secure privileges and entitlements are enwrapped within xenophobic, racist, and gendered discourses of sovereignty and nationalism. National brands derive their power from a propertied lifeworld in which individuals and communities make emotional investments in the fantasies of a return to a more simple, secure time of plenitude.