The Inner Life of Race
Souls, Bodies, and the History of Racial Power
Seiten
2024
Duke University Press (Verlag)
978-1-4780-2656-3 (ISBN)
Duke University Press (Verlag)
978-1-4780-2656-3 (ISBN)
Leerom Medovoi traces the genealogy of contemporary forms of populist racism to offer a global account of how religion and racism are used to govern and police populations.
In The Inner Life of Race, Leerom Medovoi turns away from conventional views of race as a politics of the phenotypical body to theorize race instead as a politics of populational threat. Racism’s genealogy, argues Medovoi, invokes longstanding theological distinctions between the body and the soul. While the body can be seen and marked, the soul signals potentially threatening interiorities: dangerous intentions, beliefs, or desires. Race is the power-effect of reading the body in order to police the political threat of the soul. Medovoi’s genealogy begins with medieval deployments of inquisition and confession to wage war against heretics, infidels, and their threat to the salvation of souls. In early modern Spain, these pastoral technologies of power catalyzed the invention of race as a language for the danger of formerly Jewish and Muslim converts. Medovoi shows how this discourse expanded into anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity throughout the colonial world and modern Europe, laying the foundation for racialized capitalism and liberal governmentality. Medovoi weaves histories of color-line racism, nativism, Islamophobia, antisemitism, and anticommunism into a pathbreaking account of the political work populational racism accomplishes.
In The Inner Life of Race, Leerom Medovoi turns away from conventional views of race as a politics of the phenotypical body to theorize race instead as a politics of populational threat. Racism’s genealogy, argues Medovoi, invokes longstanding theological distinctions between the body and the soul. While the body can be seen and marked, the soul signals potentially threatening interiorities: dangerous intentions, beliefs, or desires. Race is the power-effect of reading the body in order to police the political threat of the soul. Medovoi’s genealogy begins with medieval deployments of inquisition and confession to wage war against heretics, infidels, and their threat to the salvation of souls. In early modern Spain, these pastoral technologies of power catalyzed the invention of race as a language for the danger of formerly Jewish and Muslim converts. Medovoi shows how this discourse expanded into anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity throughout the colonial world and modern Europe, laying the foundation for racialized capitalism and liberal governmentality. Medovoi weaves histories of color-line racism, nativism, Islamophobia, antisemitism, and anticommunism into a pathbreaking account of the political work populational racism accomplishes.
Leerom Medovoi is Professor of English and Social, Cultural, and Critical Theory at the University of Arizona, the author of Rebels: Youth and the Cold War Origins of Identity, and the coeditor of Religion, Secularism, and Political Belonging, both also published by Duke University Press.
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction. Ensoulment: A Strategy of Racial Power 1
1. Race Before Race: The Flock and the Wolf 31
2. The Racial Turn: Frayed Fabric and Dissimulating Danger 59
3. Westphalian Reason: The Political Theology of Sedition 97
4. Racial Liberalism, Racial Capitalism: Ensouling Property’s Adversaries 133
5. Conclusion: The Many-Headed Hydra 191
Notes 217
References 243
Index
| Erscheinungsdatum | 30.07.2024 |
|---|---|
| Zusatzinfo | 11 illustrations |
| Verlagsort | North Carolina |
| Sprache | englisch |
| Maße | 152 x 229 mm |
| Gewicht | 567 g |
| Themenwelt | Geisteswissenschaften ► Religion / Theologie |
| Sozialwissenschaften ► Ethnologie | |
| Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Allgemeines / Lexika | |
| ISBN-10 | 1-4780-2656-1 / 1478026561 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-1-4780-2656-3 / 9781478026563 |
| Zustand | Neuware |
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