Introduction: Technologies of Life and Architectures of Death in Early America

[...]these modes of control are shown to differ dramatically in content and character across geography and across historical period. [...]the issue highlights the vast and varied means that those cast as disposable used to resist efforts to instrumentalize their livelihood, through the extraction of...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:American quarterly 2019-09, Vol.71 (3), p.603-624
Main Authors: LaFleur, Greta, Schuller, Kyla
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
18th century
19th century
African literature
American literature
Antebellum period
Biopolitics
Capitalism
Colonialism
Double consciousness
Early modern period
Essays
History
Mbembe, Achille (1957- )
Race
Raw materials
Sexuality
Slavery
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Summary:[...]these modes of control are shown to differ dramatically in content and character across geography and across historical period. [...]the issue highlights the vast and varied means that those cast as disposable used to resist efforts to instrumentalize their livelihood, through the extraction of work or other forms of economic value. [...]centering early America illuminates the profound role played by race science in what Myrna Perez Sheldon names in her essay as "the rise of the biopolitical secular state" in establishing new tactics for hierarchizing some lives over others. According to Foucault, the logic of biological racial difference developed in the nineteenth century in order to delineate the recently evolved, whose vitality must be fostered, from the racialized "past of th[e] race," who must be left to perish.10 This second mode of biopower has received far less attention in our field.
ISSN:0003-0678
1080-6490
1080-6490
DOI:10.1353/aq.2019.0046