Between Life and Death

Grace Hong
Gender Studies and Asian American Studies
UC Los Angeles

Jodi Kim
Ethnic Studies
UC Riverside

Participants

“Between Life and Death: Necropolitics in the Era of Late Capitalism” examined how power works between life and death. How is power constructed and administered as modes of existence and oblivion unequally? In posing this question, the group conceptualized “life” and “death” neither simply as effects of power nor as obvious and opposite biological states. Rather, the life/death conjunction constitutes a complex and uneven social relation and distribution signaling a disruption of the assumed radical discontinuity between life and death. Drawing on concepts such as necropolitics, biopower, and disposability, this group analyzed the ideologies and material practices that limit sustainability to particular privileged identities, bodies, groups, or nations and thereby marked others for social and physical death and disposability. The seminar foregrounded the ways in which these processes intersect with and complicate received theorizations of “race, gender, sexuality,” and capitalism. Neoliberalism, globalization, and neocolonialism have made the analytics and critiques around race, gender, and sexuality emerging out of mid-twentieth century liberation movements ever more important, yet have also exposed the urgency of revising and supplementing these analytics to better account for contemporary conditions. The revised analytics built on the work of theorists such as Achille Mbembe, Michel Foucault, Orlando Patterson.