VVI Research Meetings 2023-2024
Fighting Back with Taxes: Indigenous Peoples, Counter-Mapping, and the Promises of Decolonial Taxation
- Date
- Wednesday 22 November 2023
- Time
- Location
-
Kamerlingh Onnes Building
Steenschuur 25
2311 ES Leiden - Room
- C.022
While scholars have long unpacked tax’s contribution to colonialism, few have underscored its ability to empower the colonized. Accordingly, this paper explores the ways and degrees to which tax can remap space, thereby bolstering decolonization. I call this “decolonial taxation.” Taking the US as its primary case study, the paper draws on legal geography and critical cartography to argue that tax achieves two broad types of spatial decolonization. The first, “endogenous tax remapping,” takes place either within or beyond the ambit of federal Indian law and comprises initiatives that stem from tribes. The second, “collective tax remapping,” involves both tribes and outsiders and can operate inside the framework of federal Indian law or take a more radical approach. Ultimately, the paper contends, decolonial taxation sheds light on a scantily explored yet powerful way of fighting back against settler colonialism.
About Maximilien Zahnd
Maximilien (Max) Zahnd is a Lecturer in Law at the University of Sussex and a research fellow at University College London (Anthropology). Prior to joining Sussex and UCL, he held postdoctoral positions at the University of Oxford and NYU School of Law. Max’s research interests include socio-legal history, tax, colonialism and imperialism, cause lawyering, Indigenous law and politics, legal geography, and law and society. His current research explores (1) the relationship between tax, Indigenous sovereignty, and settler colonialism in North America and (2) the legal/tax histories of the French Caribbean islands. Max’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Law & Social Inquiry, Comparative Studies in Society and History, and Environment and Planning D: Society and Space.