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Accelerating Possession: Global Future of Property and Personhood. Bill Maurer and Gabrielle Schwab, eds. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. 275 pp.
In Accelerating Possession: Global Futures of Property and Personhood, editors Bill Maurer and Gabrielle Schwab observe that definitions ofpersonhood and property are rapidly changing, leaving scholars to grapple with new and disturbing "proprietarian logics" (p. 5). Where there was once a direct contractual and mutually animating bond between personhood and property, there are now a host of convoluted determinations, such as those recently put forth by the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) of Iraq. The editors see CPA's edicts as a harbinger: an unholy hybrid of strict centralization and the all-too-familiar tenets of neoliberalism so that "guarantees of some property exist without their corresponding guarantees of personhood, a profoundly illiberal formation that either perverts its Enlightenment model or merely reveals the latter's own perverse potentialities" (p. 4).
This emerging formulation, the editors suggest, is both scholarly opportunity and critical quagmire. Borrowing Jean Baudrillard's notion of "acceleration" as the imagining of and engagement with rapidly changing hyperrealities, the editors begin the volume by ruminating on how our analytical practices might keep apace with both the late capital...