This panel examines various forms of juridical and state mechanisms of protection, trusteeship, or superintendence as racialized economies of violence, domestication, possession, and intimate governance. Panelists likewise examine the collective forms of refusal and resistance that interrupt and dismantle the normative operations of law and state power. This collective inquiry centers racial regimes of property, the differential devaluation of racialized groups, and the construction and policing of categories of belonging as constitutive for capitalist accumulation. Law serves as a focus for this panel not because of the justice, protection, regulation, or resolution it claims to confer, but rather because it stages and registers political and social antagonisms - antagonisms that are in excess of its sphere of authority and jurisdiction. Together the panelists interrogate the administration of racial governance and economies of dispossession underwritten by the rule of law.

Chair: Charles R. Lawrence, III, University of Hawai’i at Mānoa

Presentations

Megan Ming Francis, University of Washington-Seattle, Risky Capital: Race, Speculation, and Convict Leasing in Texas

Alyosha Goldstein, The University of New Mexico, Holding in Trust: Fiduciary Economies and the Domestic Relation

Lee Ann S Wang, University of California-Los Angeles, Uninheritable Blood: Reproduction, Alien Land Law, and Violation