FELLOWS IN RESIDENCE - SPRING 2012

"Between Life and Death: Necropolitics in the Era of Late Capitalism"

Convener

Jodi Kim, Ethnic Studies, UC Riverside

Co-organizer

Grace Kyungwon Hong, Women’s Studies and Asian American Studies, UCLA

Participants

Curtis Marez, Ethnic Studies, UC San Diego
Thu-Huong Nguyen-vo, Asian Languages and Cultures/Asian American Studies, UCLA
Christine Hong, Literature, UC Santa Cruz
Andrea Smith, Media and Cultural Studies, UC Riverside
Sara Clarke Kaplan, Ethnic Studies, UC San Diego
Alexander Hirsch, Politics, UC Santa Cruz, Graduate Student
Lindsay Smith, Center for Society and Genetics, UCLA, Post-doctoral fellow

Abstract

"Between Life and Death: Necropolitics in the Era of Late Capitalism" will examine how power works between life and death. How does power construct and administer modes of existence and oblivion unequally? In posing this question, we seek to conceptualize “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 unevensocial 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 will analyze the ideologies and material practices that limit sustainability to particular privileged identities, bodies, groups, or nations and thereby mark others for social and physical death and disposability.

The seminar will foreground the ways in which these processes intersect with and complicate our received theorizations of “race, gender, sexuality,” and capitalism. Neoliberalism, globalization, and neocolonialism have made the analytics and critiques around race, gender, and sexuality that emerged out of mid-twentieth century liberation movements ever more important, yet have also exposed theurgency of revising and supplementing these analytics to better account forcontemporary conditions. Our revised analytics will build on the work of theorists such as Achille Mbembe, Michel Foucault, Orlando Patterson.