Native title law as 'recognition space'? : an analysis of indigenous claimant engagement with law's demands

This thesis engages in a critique of the concept of Australian native title law as a 'recognition space'. It doing so, it treats native title law as a form of identity politics, the courts a forum in which claims for the recognition of identity are made. An overview of multicultural theories of recognition exposes what is signified by the use of recognition discourse and situates this rhetoric in political and theoretical context. A critique of native title recognition discourse is then developed by reference to the insights of sociolegal scholarship, critical theory, critical anthropology and legal pluralism. These critiques suggest that legal recognition is affective and effective. This thesis highlights native title law's false assumptions as to cultural coherence and subject stasis by exploring law's demands and indigenous claimant engagement with these demands. In this analysis, law's constitutive effect is emphasized. However, a radical constructivist approach is eschewed, subject engagement explored and agency located in the limits of law's constitutive power. The effects of legal recognition discourse, its productive and enabling aspects, are considered best understood by reference to Butler's notion of provisional 'performativity'. Ultimately, claimant 'victories' of resistance and subversion are considered not insignificant, but are defined as temporary and symbolic by virtue of the structural context in which they occur