Abstract What can Indigenous deaths in custody, excessive by any measure and in all settler colonies, tell us about genocide? In this presentation, I reflect on my own scholarship on Indigenous deaths in custody, examining what I identify as the reparative thrust of settler colonialism (improvement) in Canada. I reflect on how the reparative gesture - as revealed in inquests and inquiries into indigenous deaths in custody- is a necessary component of settler colonialism's inner core, namely the elimination of the native. If the violence of settler colonialism is obscured by the state's performance of benevolent concern, and all the while a slow genocide continues apace, engaging in a reparative rather than an abolitionist politics only hastens the elimination of the native. The reparative thrust, however, is generally muted or absent altogether in settler colonies that have not transitioned from openly eliminationist to democratic regimes. How might we consider law in these various stages of settler colonialism?
Bio Sherene H. Razadck is a Distinguished Professor and the Penny Kanner Endowed Chair in the Department of Gender Studies, UCLA. She is an interdisciplinary critical race and feminist scholar whose work engages several fields including Sociology, Legal Studies, gender Studies, Ethnic Studies, American Studies and Political Science. With a central focus on racial violence, she explores how imperialism, colonialism, capitalism and patriarchy interlock to produce and sustain in a racially structured world where racialized populations are marked as disposable and subjected to an unrelenting violence. She is the founder of the Racial Violence Hub, a virtual network of scholars (racialviolencehub.com). Her books and publications examine settler colonialism, colonialism and global white supremacy with a particular focus on the gendered effects of anti-Indigenous, anti-Black, anti-Asian and anti-Muslim racism as they operate in law. Her two most recent books are: Nothing Has to Make Sense: Upholding White Supremacy Through Anti-Muslim Racism (2022) and Dying from Improvement: Inquests and Inquiries into Indigenous Deaths in Custody (2015).
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