INCARCERATION AND BIOPOWER
EDITED BY WESTON LEO RICHEY
The twin keywords of this section’s title each call to mind Michel Foucault’s explorations of power which have informed several strands of scholarly thought today. Incarceration invokes his depiction of the prison as an ur-technology of social control in Discipline and Punish (1975) and biopower describes the state’s ability to regulate human bodies and lives which Foucault discusses in The History of Sexuality, vol. 1 (1976). Donald Trump’s nascent second presidency revitalizes these Foucauldian innovations’ importance as it casts a long, dark shadow of uncertainty over the world. Several introductions to sections in this issue center this uncertainty, but scholars of bodies/minds—their control, organization, and norming—face a special urgency. Trump’s return to power is in fact a return to biopower. As his administration increasingly delights in the violent disciplining of bodies here and abroad, we must ask: where have we been, how did we get here, and where are we going? The books reviewed here, all written before Trump’s election, nonetheless sketch answers to all of these questions.
We begin with Qianqian Li’s review of the anthology Crip Genealogies, edited by Mel Y. Chen, Alison, Kafer, Eunjung Kim, and Julie Avril Minich, which traces the history of disability studies by way of tracing the history of thinking and writing about and with ‘crip.’ As Li notes, Chen et al. aim to resist “the US-centered and white-dominated scholarship in disability studies” by attending to the valences of crip and of disability studies across multiple disciplines, from affect studies to postcolonial studies to critical race studies.
The section then moves to a more imaginative space with Postracial Fantasies and Zombies: On the Racist Apocalyptic Politics Devouring the World, written by Eric King Watts and reviewed by Isabella Neubauer. Despite its title and its occasional analysis of zombie media, Neubauer argues that Watts’s book is “not [. . .] a book about zombies,” but is instead about the rendering of Black people as zombies in white media and culture. The result, Neubauer writes, is a book whose central thesis is that Blackness and zombification are of necessity intertwined. As they put it, “to be Black is to already be a zombie.”
I follow Neubauer by reviewing Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s, Michael Mark Chemers’s, and Analola Santana’s anthology Freak Inheritance: Eugenics and Extraordinary Bodies in Performance. Like Chen et al., Garland-Thomson et al. take as their task both the recapping of recent scholarship on freaks and freak shows as well as looking to the diverse applications for such scholarly interventions moving forward. As I write in my review, the effect is an anthology that is “a sometimes jagged, sometimes harmonious assemblage” which serves as a worthy entrée into the subfield and its implications.
Next is a moment of stock-taking alongside hope: Francesca Passaseo’s review of Care: The Highest Stage of Capitalism by Premilla Nadasen. Passaseo characterizes Nadasen’s argument as radically upending our common cultural understanding of care and caretaking from practices about providing for other people to “a mechanism of racialized and gendered capitalism” unto itself. By laying bare the institutionalization and commodification of care, Passaseo suggests, Nadasen paves the way for us to reenvision care work in more resistive terms.
This section ends with a return to something which might otherwise be lost in the fray of scholarship: the real-world bodies implicated by our work. To that end, Carlee A. Baker reviews Emily C. Bloom’s I Cannot Control Everything Forever: A Memoir of Motherhood, Science, and Art. Baker highlights Bloom’s intertwining of theoretical interventions and personal narrative to critique what she calls “scientific motherhood.” The effect, Baker concludes, is a book that is “at once forceful and deeply caring.”
The five books reviewed in this section all swirl around the ways in which bodies/minds-–whether crip, freak, racialized, or in need of care—become the objects of domination. Each day those of us working in the US must confront an order ever more obsessed by this domination, the insatiable desire to discipline, to punish, and norm deviant bodies. But what the books reviewed here also demonstrate is that power can be confronted, understood, and survived. To do this, however, we must understand the past and dare to innovate on it. The old ways of thought and action were not made for our bodies today, but in their afterlives there may be space where we fit.
