Entering the moment of impossibility: Indigenous sovereignty and the white subject in Critical Race Theory

Utilising Derrida's notion of the impossible as a moment of critical breakthrough, Irene Watson suggests that it is precisely the impossibility of settling Indigenous sovereignty, based on ontologies of belonging, with the possessive sovereignty of the "mono-nation", that is "the ground 'exactly' where our thinking should begin". Drawing on Australian, North American and Aotearoa Indigenous scholarship the paper considers how the notion of sovereignty is critically re-invented and made into "a performative destabilisation" of the nation state. It brings this concept of indigenous sovereignty into a theoretical relationship with critical race and whiteness theory in terms of the possessive sovereignty that underwrites the settler-colony state and asks what are the implications for the white subject?