Browsing by Subject "Biopolitics"
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Item The biopolitics of belonging : Europe in post-Cold War Arabic literature of migration(2013-08) Sellman, Johanna Barbro; El-Ariss, TarekSince the 1990s, a corpus of Arabic literary narratives has appeared that stage Europe from the perspective of forced migrants. This literature on refugees, asylum seekers, and clandestine migrants articulates central problems of migration to Europe in a period of migration policy reform in response to globalization. In this dissertation, I analyze a selection of Arabic and francophone North African literary narratives, including Mahmoud al-Bayaty's 2006 "Dancing on Water", Iqbal Qazwini's 2006 "Zubaida’s Window", Farouq Yousef's 2007 "Nothing and Nobody", Hamid Skif's 2006 "The Geography of Danger", Youssef Fadel's 2000 "Hashish", and Mahi Binebine's 1999 "Welcome to Paradise". This study is situated at the intersection of forced migration studies and Arabic literary studies. As the effort to standardize European migration policy and manage migration has increased states' power to filter and exclude, the human rights framework of migration policy has weakened (Fekete 2009; Menz 2008). Such shifts represent an intensification of what Michel Foucault calls "biopolitics," modern states' propensity to manage populations by producing belonging and exclusion (Foucault 2003). Literature of migration has become an important vehicle for reflecting on the ways that migration policies produce belonging and exclusion in contemporary Europe. Literature of forced migration requires modes of analysis that differ from the more modernist notions of exile that have dominated literary studies (Malkki 1995; McLeod 2000; Parvati 2010). In this study, I draw attention to the ways that literary narratives of migration re-figure Europe as a wilderness. The works that I analyze explore precarious migrant subjectivities through forests, urban jungles, and cannibalism, spaces onto which fantasies (and often nightmares) of the outside of political community can be projected Furthermore, I argue that wilderness provides sites of negotiation between the biopolitical and ideals of rights-based citizenship. While the biopolitical does not serve as a foundation of belonging in these narratives as suggested by some theorists (Agamben 2008), the literature posits new modes of belonging through the very exclusions produced by forced migration.Item "We have a road map". Whiteness, biopolitics, and the rise of technocratic philanthrocapitalism: the emergent neoliberal governance project of the Guatemalan oligarchy(2013-12) Perera, Daniel Alejandro; Hale, Charles R., 1957-; Ballí, CeciliaScholars have tended to frame the rise of neoliberal governance in Guatemala as primarily shaped by the tangled, often contradictory relations between three main actors: multilateral organizations and international financial institutions, the state, and individual and collective subjects of rights. This thesis intends to contribute to the literature by focusing on a social actor that is seldom investigated academically—especially ethnographically—despite the determinant role that it has historically played in the destiny of Guatemala, namely, the oligarchy: an elite group of Guatemalans who by virtue of class position, family networks, and membership in business associations have “ruled since the conquest.” An ethnographic appraisal of elite discourses, attitudes, and practices, as well as an attunement to the affective dimension of elite subjectivities, can generate a better understanding of how historical relations of domination and exclusion in Guatemala are currently being reconfigured. Based on ethnographic research and a series of interviews with a dozen of its leading members in July and August of 2012, this thesis is an inquiry into the contemporary governance project of the Guatemalan oligarchy and the place that it allots to multiculturalism. In this sense, it has three main objectives: firstly, to characterize an increasingly coherent liberal discourse of national development, modernization, and corporate social responsibility emanating from the economic elite’s private foundations, think tanks and business associations. Secondly, it summarily compares this discourse to the general observable trends of capitalist accumulation around new dynamic “axes”: megaprojects (the construction of major infrastructure such as roads and highways, bridges, airports, seaports; as well as call centers, corporate tourism, malls, technological corridors, hydroelectric power plants); the agroindustrial production of mega-monocrops for agrofuels (sugarcane and African oil palm), and; extraction and commercialization of natural resources (minerals, oil, cement), as documented by other analysts. Finally, it examines the current status of multiculturalism and the ascendancy of whiteness within this emergent material and discursive landscape. I have termed this emergent model of neoliberal governance “technocratic philanthrocapitalism.”Item Writing with care : Yan Lianke and the biopolitics of modern Chinese censorship(2015-05) Chambers, Harlan David; Tsai, Chien-hsin, 1975-; El-Ariss, TarekAuthor Yan Lianke's experiences with censorship frame this investigation into the relationship between life, politics, and writing in modern China. As Yan's case shows, Chinese censorship goes beyond textual redaction, seeking to reform the very life of political subjects. The effects of this move to bridge politics and life are best demonstrated by acts of internalized censorship (e.g., "self censorship"), widespread in China's modern cultural scene. The historical genealogy of internalized censorship reveals it to be part of a broader Chinese Communist Party program of thought work, engaged in remolding the lives of political subjects. Revisiting the fundamentals of Michel Foucault's biopolitical theory, I argue that this form of censorship plays a key role in the party’s biohistory, the historical institutionalization of power aimed at radically politicizing life itself. The first chapter of this report sketches out the historical foundations of Chinese biopolitics. Regimes of thought work are shown to have been developed as disciplinary techniques of censoring and censuring, systematically deployed to correct individuals' ideological errors. Re-imagining disobedience as illness, the state sought to cure its citizens through "disciplinary care." The Communist Party has thus established institutions seeking to completely fold life into politics; consequently, top-down techniques like censorship have reemerged in the bottom-up phenomenon of internalized censoring. The second chapter returns to the novels of Yan Lianke to argue that his literature responds to the legacy of thought work with a distinct form of "literary care." His recent novels restage historical events in order to narrate confrontations between writers and institutions of state power. Through these encounters, Yan's writing unfolds literary care as a strategy to shield non-normative forms of life against powers aiming to rectify their ideological idiosyncrasies. Literary care thus affirms ways of being that exceed exclusively political interpretive frameworks. In the face of censorship, Yan Lianke does not dream of an autonomous sphere of artistic expression, nor does he campaign for a simplistic notion of intellectual liberty. Instead, Yan Lianke writes with literary care, never neglecting relations between life and politics but maintaining that one is not reducible to the other.