Department Speaker Series: Lee Medovoi, "The Inner Life of Race"

 

Calling into question accounts of race as a politics of embodiment, this talk approaches race instead as a biopolitics of populational threat that relies on a longstanding dialectic of body and soul. While the body can be seen and marked, the soul signals potentially threatening interiorities: dangerous intentions, beliefs, or desires. This talk approaches race as the power-effect of reading and securing the body in order to police the political threat of inner life. In this talk I will sketch a genealogy of racial securitization that 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 policing the danger of formerly Jewish and Muslim converts. I consider 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. My talk will weave together the histories of color-line racism, nativism, Islamophobia, antisemitism, and anticommunism into a general account of populational racism that sheds light on the flexible targeting of populations we are facing in an era of strengthening far-right populism.