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In the mid to late nineteenth century, as English and French settlers were in the process of consolidating their colonial Dominion over vast First Nations' territories in the form of a Canadian federal state, the government enacted legislation to create the juridical category of the Indian. Binding together identity with access to land, Indian status and the Indian reserve would come irrevocably to define and regulate the lives of First Nations people in Canada from the mid-nineteenth century until the present. The creation of the "Indian" as a juridical category, along with the Indian reserve as a space of domination, marks a specific historical conjuncture—one in which identity (or indeed, subjectivity itself) and property relations were bound to one another, creating an apparatus [2] of colonial knowledge and governance that structures the ongoing dispossession of First Nations women.

The main theme that I address in this paper is the boycott as a form of political solidarity. Recalling one of the primary objectives of Black and Third World feminist activists and scholars, I explore how BDS is one of the primary ways of building solidarity with Palestinians living under occupation. The logic of BDS is that of a unified, anti-racist and anti-colonial politics, which counters the logic of the Oslo Accords, one of fragmentation along multiple axes.

In this article, we want to think through this articulation of race, property and capitalist abstraction, exploring how attention to the forms of property may permit novel and politically urgent insights into the relationship between capitalism and race, addressing a critical area of social contestation in which processes of racialisation are intensely present, but in which they are also frequently 'disappeared'. We revisit the place of property in Marxist theories of abstraction, to consider whether it can provide us with some of the instruments to think the present conjuncture, but also to explore the ways in which a consideration of the racial logics of property may require us to recalibrate our understanding of the violence of abstraction.

In his "Theses On the Philosophy of History" (1940), Walter Benjamin called for a blasting open of the continuum of history. His call was one that would bring into question teleological narratives of progress, and urge a radical rethinking of the concept of the "present". Similarly, Judith Jack Halberstam considers the ability of new temporal logics to "open up new life narratives and alternative relations to time and space" (2005). Though differently conceptualised, these insights from Benjamin and Halberstam make poignant interventions on the pitfalls of unreflective time, and the political possibilities of imagining a new temporality. What do such insights mean for feminist legal studies? Has an orientation towards a "future" feminist ideal been productive in feminist legal scholarship and activism? How does your own work engage with temporality? Does a reconceptualization of time offer any insight for your work, or for feminist legal projects more generally? Discussion of these questions intends to interrogate what is often taken for granted as "progress" within the field, and to consider the benefits and drawbacks of thinking feminist research and activism inside or outside (or indeed of deploying this dualism in the first place) the domain of chronological time.This Roundtable Discussion was recorded at the PECANS (Postgraduate and Early Career Academics Network) conference, 'Transgressing Power(s)', held at the University of Westminster, UK, on 30 April 2010. It was organised by Stacy Douglas and chaired by Sarah Keenan.