You are enthusiastically invited to a talk by Dr. Lee Medovoi on Friday, February 23 from 3-4:30 in the Stern Room, Philip Austin 217. Dr. Medovoi will be talking about his forthcoming book with Duke UP entitled The Inner Life of Race: Souls, Bodies and the History of Racial Power (abstract below). The talk is co-sponsored by English, American studies, Women's, Gender and Sexuality studies, Political Science, and the Graduate Political Theory workshop, and is free and open to the public.
Dr. Medovoi is a Professor in the Department of English at the University of Arizona and the Founding Chair (currently Vice Chair) of U Arizona’s Graduate Program in Social, Cultural and Critical Theory. A graduate of the Ph.D. program in Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford University, he started the Portland Center for Public Humanities during his time at Portland State University.
Abstract:
The Inner Life of Race: Souls, Bodies and the History of Racial Power (forthcoming Duke University Press 2024) situates color-line racisms, antiblackness, Islamophobia, antisemitism and even anticommunism within a larger analytic of modern power. It argues that race is not the cause but the effect of a centuries-old mode of politics that targets populations as strategic sites for the policing of threat. It traces the key role played by the soul and other analogs of inner life (the mind, the conscience) as ‘prisons of the body’.
Although the book responds to a current global moment in which right-wing populist governments have built political power by calling for a war of security against various populational enemies, it places our conjuncture within a long history. Practices of ensoulment have religious origins, reaching back to the medieval targeting of the heretic or infidel who endangers the church’s eternal life. While these practices predate race, they nevertheless provide essential preconditions for its invention in early modern Iberia and its colonies and for its futures thereafter. As successive chapters show, ensoulment initiated the project of the racial security state and put the “racial” in racial capitalism. After tracing this long genealogy of racial ensoulment, the book culminates in a reflection on lessons for antiracist work today.
Hope to see you there!!!
For more information, contact: April Anson at april.anson@uconn.edu