Renisa Mawani

Research Areas

Colonial Legal History; Critical Theory, Race and Racism; Affect; Time and Temporality; Oceans and Maritime Worlds; Settler Colonialism and Migration; Colonial India and the Diaspora; More-than-human Worlds

Research Interests

My research is organized along two trajectories.

The first meets at the interface of critical theory and legal history. To date, my work has aimed to write histories of colonial dispossession aimed at Indigenous peoples and restrictions imposed on “Asiatic” migration (from China and India, in particular) as conjoined and entangled colonial legal processes that are central to the politics of settler colonialism, historically and in the contemporary moment. My first book, Colonial Proximities (2009), details legal encounters between Indigenous peoples, Chinese migrants, Europeans, and those enumerated as “mixed race” along Canada’s west coast. The book considers how state racisms were produced and mobilized through land, law, and labour in sites of colonial re-settlement and offers a critical engagement with Foucault’s conceptualization of biopolitics.

My second book, Across Oceans of Law (2018), traces the currents and counter-currents of British/ colonial law and Indian radicalism through the 1914 journey of the S.S. Komagata Maru, a British-built and Japanese owned steamship. The book draws on archival research conducted in Canada, India, and the U.K. It reorients the ship’s passage away from the optics of immigration, nationalism, and landfall that have been so persistent, towards a global and maritime legal history. By following this one ship through time and space, the book draws the Pacific, Indian, and Atlantic Oceans into a single analytic frame, and in so doing, explores the entanglements between transatlantic slavery, efforts to dispossess Indigenous peoples from their lands and waterways, Indian indenture, and “free” migration.

My current book project, Enemies of Empire: Commerce and Confinement in Colonial India, Burma, and Siam, 1914-1920, may be read as a sequel to Across Oceans of Law. Focused on the Ingress into India Ordinance and the Foreigners Ordinance, the book examines how colonial officials sought to redraw and control maritime and land-based borders between India, Burma, and Siam during the World War I period and beyond. In September 1914, as authorities anticipated the arrival of the Komagata Maru, Lord Hardinge, the Governor-General of India, signed the Ingress into India Ordinance which granted local police and magistrates unprecedented powers to arrest and detain Indian men returning from abroad. The ordinance was ostensibly aimed at so-called seditionists from Punjab but was used more widely, criminalizing merchants and traders in India, Burma, and Siam. To document the coercive effects of the Ingress, including the devastating consequences it had for families, I present a legal history through family biography. The protagonists of this story include four Muslim brothers from Gujarat who were living and working along the Burma-Siam border and seeking new economic opportunities beyond the impositions of caste. Under the auspices of war-time security, the Ingress granted colonial authorities the ability to criminalize trading families, thereby expanding the imperial carceral state and creating new “enemies of empire” in the process.

My second set of interests, “legalities of nature,” coalesce at the juncture of science, law, and history. I have written a series of articles on law and nature through parks and place. A central concern has been the ways in which colonial violence has been imposed and legitimized through racial, legal, civic, and state claims to nature, identity, and wilderness.

I have written a series of essays and articles exploring the legalities of nature the appropriation of holometabolous insects as labouring bodies in contemporary geopolitics. Focused on global food production, climate change, and forms of war, this project draws from anticolonial writings and postcolonial theory and places them into conversation with the philosophy of time, movement, and change in the work Henri Bergson.

Education
Ph.D., University of Toronto
Postdoctoral Fellowship, University of Toronto

Other Affiliations
Faculty Associate, Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies
Faculty Associate, Green College
Faculty Associate, Liu Institute for Global Issues