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

by Thomas Blom Hansen (Editor), Finn Stepputat (Editor)

Overview

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 María 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781400826698
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	01/13/2009
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	384
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

Preface vii
List of Contributors ix
Introduction 1
Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat
RACE, LAW, AND CITIZENSHIP
Territorializing the Nation and ''Integrating the Indian'': ''Mestizaje'' in Mexican Official Discourses and Public Culture by Ana María Alonso 39
Violence, Sovereignty, and Citizenship in Postcolonial Peru by Finn Stepputat 61
Sovereign Violence and the Domain of the Political by Partha Chatterjee 82
DEATH, ANXIETY, AND RITUALS OF STATE
Confinement and the Imagination: Sovereignty and Subjectivity in a Quasi-State Yael Navaro-Yashin 103
Naturing the Nation: Aliens, Apocalypse, and the Postcolonial State by Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff 120
Sovereignty as a Form of Expenditure by Achille Mbembe 148
BODY, LOCALITY, AND INFORMAL SOVEREIGNTY
Sovereigns beyond the State: On Legality and Authority in Urban India by Thomas Blom Hansen 169
The Sovereign Outsourced: Local Justice and Violence in Port Elizabeth by Lars Buur 192
Above the Law: Practices of Sovereignty in Surrey Estate, Cape Town by Steffen Jensen 218
POSTCOLONIAL CITIZENSHIP IN THE EMPIRE
Citizenship and Empire by Barry Hindess 241
Splintering Cosmopolitanism: Asian Immigrants and Zones of Autonomy in the American West by Aihwa Ong 257
Virtual India: Indian IT Labor and the Nation-State by Peter van der Veer 276
Inside Out: The Reorganization of National Identity in Norway ivind Fuglerud 291
Suspended Spaces--Contesting Sovereignties in a Refugee Camp by Simon Turner 312
Bibliography 333
Index 363

What People are Saying About This

Eric Worby

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 postnational 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 principal means by which such projects are contingently realized, they have provided scholars of the postcolonial world with a new set of conceptual tools to think about power beyond the state.
— Eric Worby, Yale University

Dipesh Chakrabarty

This exciting book brings together essays that represent some of the new turns in recent political thought in and about the formerly colonized regions of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Moreover, throughout the volume these essays are in conversation with case studies from the West and with Western political philosophy. Sovereign Bodies is a significant and timely contribution to ongoing attempts at producing political ethnographies and theories of globalization.
— Dipesh Chakrabarty, University of Chicago, author of "Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference"

From the Publisher

"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 postnational 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 principal means by which such projects are contingently realized, they have provided scholars of the postcolonial world with a new set of conceptual tools to think about power beyond the state."—Eric Worby, Yale University

"This exciting book brings together essays that represent some of the new turns in recent political thought in and about the formerly colonized regions of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Moreover, throughout the volume these essays are in conversation with case studies from the West and with Western political philosophy. Sovereign Bodies is a significant and timely contribution to ongoing attempts at producing political ethnographies and theories of globalization."—Dipesh Chakrabarty, University of Chicago, author of Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference

Editorial Reviews

"This exciting book brings together essays that represent some of the new turns in recent political thought in and about the formerly colonized regions of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Moreover, throughout the volume these essays are in conversation with case studies from the West and with Western political philosophy. Sovereign Bodies is a significant and timely contribution to ongoing attempts at producing political ethnographies and theories of globalization."--Dipesh Chakrabarty, University of Chicago, author of Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference

"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 postnational 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 principal means by which such projects are contingently realized, they have provided scholars of the postcolonial world with a new set of conceptual tools to think about power beyond the state."--Eric Worby, Yale University

From the Publisher