Sovereign Bodies: Citizens, Migrants, and States in the Postcolonial World

Description

9/11 and its aftermath have shown that our ideas about what constitutes sovereign power lag dangerously behind the burgeoning claims to rights and recognition within and across national boundaries. New configurations of sovereignty are at the heart of political and cultural transformations globally. Sovereign Bodies shifts the debate on sovereign power away from territoriality and external recognition of state power, toward the shaping of sovereign power through the exercise of violence over human bodies and populations. In this volume, sovereign power, whether exercised by a nation-state or by a local despotic power or community, is understood and scrutinized as something tentative and unstable whose efficacy depends less on formal rules than on repeated acts of violence. Following the editors' introduction are fourteen essays by leading scholars from around the globe that analyze cultural meanings of sovereign power and violence, as well as practices of citizenship and belonging--in South Africa, Peru, India, Mexico, Cyprus, Norway, and also among transnational Chinese and Indian populations.Sovereign Bodies enriches our understanding of power and sovereignty in the postcolonial world and in "the West" while opening new conceptual fields in the anthropology of politics. The contributors are Ana Maria Alonso, Lars Buur, Partha Chatterjee, Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, Oivind Fuglerud, Thomas Blom Hansen, Barry Hindess, Steffen Jensen, Achille Mbembe, Aihwa Ong, Finn Stepputat, Simon Turner, Peter van der Veer, and Yael Navaro-Yashin.

Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat previously coedited "States of Imagination: Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State". Hansen is Professor of Anthropology at Yale University. His recent books include "Wages of Violence: Naming and Identity in Postcolonial Bombay" and "The Saffron Wave: Democracy and Hindu Nationalism in Modern India" (both Princeton). Stepputat is Senior Researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies.

"This invigorating and intellectually stimulating book promises to reinvent the very questions we ask about the practice, object, and experience of the political in the post-national age that is coming ever more sharply into view. The authors provide a serviceable and relevant theoretical horizon not only for a moribund political anthropology but for a sclerotic political science as well. By placing the problem of sovereignty at the heart of political projects of all kinds, and by focusing on violence as the principle means by which such projects are contingently realized, they have provided scholars of the post-colonial world with a new set of conceptual tools to think about power beyond the state." - Eric Worby, Yale University"