7 - Biopolitics and Colonial Accusation

Summary

The seventh chapter focuses more directly on a third assemblage of these variously integrated powers – biopolitics. Colonial biopolitics generated and worked through categories that located individuals within divisive population groups (Swiffen and Paget 2022). Revealing an imagined normative social hierarchy, colonial criminal accusation assigned individuals to economic, racialized, and gendered population groups that congealed with white, male, possessive relational orderings. A remarkable assembly of Cree leaders perceptively challenged dispossessing colonial law and order in a translated public letter submitted to a local newspaper. Without political processes to manage conflicts between opposing legal fields, lawless violence could quickly descend around accusatory thresholds – as revealed by a case involving the police inspector Dickens (one the famous author’s sons). Through this example we glimpse the struggles by which colonial theatres of criminal accusation tried to assert monopolistic jurisdiction – highlighting how violence and force were the currency of lawless, biopolitical battles to declare law. As is outlined, such powers have left enduring legacies of inequality within criminal justice systems today.