“Racism is a perfect crime”: favela residents’ everyday experiences of police pacification, urban militarization, and prejudice in Rio de Janeiro

Public penology: postcolonial biopolitics and a death in Alipur Central Jail, Calcutta

Bhattacharya, B. (2009) ‘Public penology: postcolonial biopolitics and a death in Alipur Central Jail, Calcutta’, Postcolonial Studies, 12(1), pp. 7–28. doi: 10.1080/13688790802616225. Abstract: This article reads the unusual public nature of a recent event of capital punishment in India to think about the modes of postcolonial biopolitics in this age of globalization. It engages with influential theoretical work by authors such as Foucault, Agamben and Mbembe to articulate its own position and to suggest new theoretical paradigms. It argues that contemporary modes of postcolonial biopolitics need to be seen as emerging from and somewhat repeating the contiguous but affiliated histories of colonial penal reform and legislation. The governing paradigm for such colonial practices was provided by the multivalent phenomenon of racism, and this emphasis on race as a practical means of population management and ordering had profound impact on postcolonial penology. The crucial questions of ‘making live’ or ‘letting die’ in the postcolonial world, or the civil authority of the postcolonial state, and, most crucially, the exclusive claim of such states to legitimate violence, the article argues, need to be contextualized against such elaborate historical networks. Though the emphasis on race has been replaced in the postcolonial era with more pressing concerns of class/caste apartheid, the racist nature of the postcolonial state—a legacy of congruous but affiliated histories of colonialism—is prominently visible in provisions like the death penalty. The Indian state, on its way to defend the provision of the death penalty in this era of globalization, repeats a colonial moment in legal history and attempts to define both postcolonial biopolitics and sovereignty through the dark and slippery notions of race. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com [https://necropolitics.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

“Racism is a perfect crime”: favela residents’ everyday experiences of police pacification, urban militarization, and prejudice in Rio de Janeiro

Håndlykken-Luz, Å. (2020) ‘“Racism is a perfect crime”: favela residents’ everyday experiences of police pacification, urban militarization, and prejudice in Rio de Janeiro’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 43(16), pp. 348–367. doi: 10.1080/01419870.2020.1800774. Abstract: This article examines residents’ everyday experiences and perceptions of changing urban politics and racism in a “pacified” favela, or poor informal neighbourhood, in Rio de Janeiro, drawing on longitudinal ethnographic data from 2011 to 2018. The findings suggest that despite a discourse on inclusion, human rights, and citizenship, the police pacification program and urban security interventions aimed at “civilizing” the favela’s residents as “undesirable others,” drawing on racialization. The naturalization, legitimization, and reproduction of police violence promote the operation of racial and socio-spatial inequalities and privileges through what I describe as pigmentocratic everyday practices. These processes continually shape the condition of possibilities for the dehumanization of blackness, exclusion, inclusion, and resistance in a society influenced by the myth of racial democracy and that celebrates both diversity and ideologies of whitening. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com [https://necropolitics.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

‘Causes’ versus ‘Conditions’: Imperial Sovereignty, Postcolonial Violence and the recent Re-Emergence of Arendtian Political Thought in African Studies

Lee, C. J. (2008) ‘‘Causes’ versus ‘Conditions’: Imperial Sovereignty, Postcolonial Violence and the recent Re-Emergence of Arendtian Political Thought in African Studies’, South African Historical Journal, 60(1), pp. 124–146. doi: 10.1080/02582470802287752. Abstract: Since the Rwandan genocide of 1994, an increase in scholarship on genocide and mass violence has developed over the past ten years, an interdisciplinary effort that has initiated a search for both a ‘usable past’ and at times a useful ‘theoretical past’. Against this backdrop, this article is concerned with the provisional re-emergence of Hannah Arendt’s thought in African studies. It aims to explore the main facets of this under-recognised legacy to claim a contemporary place for her within the history of political thought on Africa and imperialism more generally. Divided into two parts, this essay first provides a summary of Arendt’s engagement with imperial conditions in Africa, as found in her first major work The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). Her influence is then traced in recent studies on South Africa and Rwanda, though not without critique. The insights and limitations of her interpretations rest on a distinction between ‘causes’ versus ‘conditions’, with her emphasis on the latter circumscribing the effectiveness of her analysis. Distinguishing such points of view is a key lesson to be drawn from her work, offering further means for understanding and assessing the contours of contemporary scholarship. This essay concludes that her ideas have prefigured current debates and deserve renewed recognition. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com [https://necropolitics.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Youth as Death

Neely, A. H. (2024) ‘Youth as Death’, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 114(10), pp. 2281–2296. doi: 10.1080/24694452.2024.2374922. Abstract: Since the end of apartheid, life in South Africa has been marked by an epidemic of death among the youth—people between the ages of fifteen and thirty-five. First as a result of HIV/AIDS and political violence, and more recently as a result of “these diseases,” a broad group of illnesses that affect the youth, homicide and suicide, this epidemic is in part a consequence of ongoing processes of settler colonialism and racial capitalism in South Africa. This epidemic of death can also be understood as an example of necropolitics—the failure of the postapartheid state. At the same time, as the stories in this article reveal, no one or two analytical approach(es) can fully make sense of what it means to live in a place where the youth are dying at such a high rate. Drawing inspiration from work in Black studies, and Black feminisms more specifically, and driven by the stories of those living through loss in South Africa, this article sketches what it means to live in a place where youth is defined by death. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com [https://necropolitics.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

‘We Want Them Alive!’: The Politics and Culture of Human Rights

Fregoso, R. L. (2006) ‘‘We Want Them Alive!’: The Politics and Culture of Human Rights’, Social Identities, 12(2), pp. 109–138. doi: 10.1080/13504630600583296. Abstract: In this essay I argue that a new order of power is emerging on the US-Mexico borderlands. This order of power is necropolitical. I then analyse feminicides on the borderlands in relation to this emerging order of power. Drawing upon theories of sovereignty, I argue that the consolidation of a necropolitical order in the region is a result of the convergence and intersection of multiple forces and processes, including militarization, denationalization, neoliberalism and ingovernability. Secondly, I examine the countervailing forces to this emerging order of power, especially the turn to a politics of human rights by grassroots and transnational collectivities. Finally, my essay probes the role of culture in shaping new understandings of human rights and re-imagining new democratic possibilities and subjectivities. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com [https://necropolitics.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]