May 15, 2012
UC Irvine
Talk by Alexander G. Weheliye, Associate Professor, African American Studies and English, Northwestern University. This talk contends that the concepts of bare life and biopolitics severely limit how we understand current uneven global power structures and foreclose the possibility of their abolition. Bare life and biopolitics discourse not only misconstrues the deep anchoring of race and racism in the modern idea of the human, it also overlooks or perfunctorily dismisses theorizations of race, subjection, and humanity found in black and ethnic studies. This dismissal allows bare life and biopolitics discourse to imagine an indivisible biological substance anterior to racialization. The idea of racializing assemblages, in contrast, construes race not as a biological or cultural classification but as a set of sociopolitical processes that discipline humanity into full humans, not-quite-humans, and non-humans. The notion of racializing assemblages foregrounds the centrality of race to the many ways differentiation, hierarchy, exclusion, and social death define the modern human and works toward devising new forms of human life.
Hosted by UCHRI’s spring 2012 residential research group, Between Life and Death: Necropolitics in the Era of Late Capitalism.
