Habeas Viscus focuses attention on the centrality of race to notions of the human. Alexander G. Weheliye develops a theory of "racializing assemblages," taking race as a set of sociopolitical processes that discipline humanity into full humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans. This disciplining, while not biological per se, frequently depends on anchoring political hierarchies in human flesh. The work of the black feminist scholars Hortense Spillers and Sylvia Wynter is vital to Weheliye's argument. Particularly significant are their contributions to the intellectual project of black studies vis-à-vis racialization and the category of the human in western modernity. Wynter and Spillers configure black studies as an endeavor to disrupt the governing conception of humanity as synonymous with white, western man. Weheliye posits black feminist theories of modern humanity as useful correctives to the "bare life and biopolitics discourse" exemplified by the works of Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault, which, Weheliye contends, vastly underestimate the conceptual and political significance of race in constructions of the human. Habeas Viscus reveals the pressing need to make the insights of black studies and black feminism foundational to the study of modern humanity.
ISBN-13: 9780822357018
Media Type: Paperback
Publisher: Duke University Press
Publication Date: 08-20-2014
Pages: 220
Product Dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.46(d)
Alexander G. Weheliye is Professor of African American Studies and English at Northwestern University. He is the author of Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity, also published by Duke University Press.
What People are Saying About This
The House that Race Built: Black Americans, U.S. Terrain - Wahneema Lubiano
"Habeas Viscus is a major contribution to the discourses of race and modern politics. Alexander G. Weheliye intervenes in contemporary engagement with Agamben's and Foucault's scholarship on biopolitics by opening new lines of inquiry for thinking through the problem of the human. Weheliye turns to the work of two major scholars and theorists of black studies, Hortense Spillers and Sylvia Wynter, revealing their thinking about the material and discursive existence of black bodies as vital analytical rubrics for conceptualizing the human."
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: Now 1
1. Blackness: The Human 17
2. Bare Life: The Flesh 33
3. Assemblages: Articulation 46
4. Racism: Biopolitics 53
5. Law: Property 74
6. Depravation: Pornotropes 89
7. Deprivation: Hunger 113
8. Freedom: Soon 125
Notes 139
Bibliography 181
Index 205
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