The Foot and the Spear: Enlightenment Natural Law, Translation, and Indigenous Sovereignty in Australia

This article argues that translation is essential to the theory of occupation found in the European natural law texts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and that translation is complicit in colonialist occupation. The translation of Samuel Pufendorf’s De jure naturae et gentium ( On The Law of Nature and Nations, 1672) from Latin into English by Basil Kennett and into French by Jean Barbeyrac involved a language politics that linked these languages to forms of political sovereignty that were imagined as universal. To critique this concept of universal sovereign untranslatability, the article considers The Uluru Statement from the Heart (2017) by the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples of Australia, which posits a practice of translation that does not rely on sovereign untranslatability, but which brings distinct idioms into conversation with each other. This theory and practice of translation can be the basis for a reworking of settler colonialism.