Draft only – not to be cited or reproduced without the author’s permission Kathleen Birrell: kbirrell@unimelb.edu.au STUDIES IN LAW, POLITICS & SOCIETY INDIGENEITY: BEFORE AND BEYOND THE LAW Kathleen Birrell Birkbeck, University of London ABSTRACT This paper is concerned with the question that is indigeneity, and its situation within literary and juridical imaginaries. As a persistently unsettling presence, indigeneity appears outside the law, before the law, and beyond the law – indeed, in Derrida’s terms, as an evocation of the unconditional. Whereas the law determines indigeneity in order to recognise it, I propose that its expression in Indigenous literature evokes an unconditional to which the law must perpetually, if momentarily, respond. This paper elaborates a conception of indigeneity, as expressed in Indigenous literature, as disruptive and deconstructive of non-Indigenous law, opening its narratives to transformation.