The Present Politics of the Past : Indigenous Legal Activism and Resistance to (Neo)Liberal Government

This work applies Jacques Derrida’s framework of ‘spectropolitics’ to (post)coloniality in order to investigate the emergence of indigenous people’s movements, advance a poststructural approach to the analysis of liberal politics based upon the historical sociology of Michel Foucault, and critically engage the literatures on ethnic politics, critical legal studies, and multicultural democracy.In addition, two historical case dossiers (the Mabo v.Queensland decision and its aftermath in Australia; and the diverse legal strategies of First Nations activism in Canada following the Delgamuukw v.B.C. decision) focus on the ‘strategic space’ in which new indigenous political identities are produced and performed.