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

by Hansen, Thomas Blom; Stepputat, Finn

• ISBN13: 9781400826698
• ISBN10: 1400826691
• Copyright: 2008-09-02
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr

Summary

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 Bodiesshifts 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 Mariacute;a 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.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. vii
List of Contributors	p. ix
Introduction	p. 1
Race, Law, And Citizenship
Territorializing the Nation and "Integrating the Indian": "Mestizaje" in Mexican Official Discourses and Public Culture	p. 39
Violence, Sovereignty, and Citizenship in Postcolonial Peru	p. 61
Sovereign Violence and the Domain of the Political	p. 82
Death, Anxiety, And Rituals Of State
Confinement and the Imagination: Sovereignty and Subjectivity in a Quasi-State	p. 103
Naturing the Nation: Aliens, Apocalypse, and the Postcolonial State	p. 120
Sovereignty as a Form of Expenditure	p. 148
Body, Locality, And Informal Sovereignty
Sovereigns beyond the State: On Legality and Authority in Urban India	p. 169
The Sovereign Outsourced: Local Justice and Violence in Port Elizabeth	p. 192
Above the Law: Practices of Sovereignty in Surrey Estate, Cape Town	p. 218
Postcolonial Citizenship In The Empire
Citizenship and Empire	p. 241
Splintering Cosmopolitanism: Asian Immigrants and Zones of Autonomy in the American West	p. 257
Virtual India: Indian IT Labor and the Nation-State	p. 276
Inside Out: The Reorganization of National Identity in Norway ivind Fuglerud	p. 291
Suspended Spaces--Contesting Sovereignties in a Refugee Camp	p. 312
Bibliography	p. 333
Index	p. 363
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