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This book explores Ottoman local governance during the liberal-capitalist state formation of the long 19^th century (1789-1922) with a particular focus on the administrative and judiciary councils of the Vidin County in the second half of the 19^th century. It explains the structure and procedures of these councils and provides an analysis of their function in local politics and economics in addition to an examination of their correspondence and people who worked in the governmental sphere dominated by these councils. Between 1396 and 1878, Vidin was a town under Ottoman administration and became a county centre in the Danube Province when an imperial reform restructured provincial governance and redefined imperial administrative divisions in 1864. The processes explored here focus mostly on the individuals’ rights to the means of production because a majority of the disputes within and petitions from the provinces during the nineteenth century were concerned with property and taxation. Local agents and groups engaged with each other within the judicio-administrative sphere dominated by these councils and sought to advance their interests by using the language, rules and practices of Ottoman governance. This book argues that in 19^th century Vidin, we do not see a binary opposition between a state that coerces transformation against a society that opposes reforms. Vidiners, including the notables and the less wealthy inhabitants utilized the judicio-administrative sphere as a hegemonic domain to pursue their strategies as they problematized proper governance (debating matters of property, security, market order and population) as part of Ottoman biopolitics.

Attempts at educational equity amount to local activities performed within unequal and disjunctive political forces. As a politics, educational equity is redolent of the conditions that produce unequal schooling in the first place. Based on a four-year multi-modal study, this book identifies the forces that produced unequal schooling opportunities for Black families in Toronto, Canada, while simultaneously identifying the conditions that generated an Africentric Alternative School for these families and the Black community. The book identifies how the conditions that created unequal schooling were some of the very conditions that produced educational equity in the form of the school. This includes four preconditions to relay an account of the school’s origin, including biopolitics, neoliberalism, the politics of recognition, and the city and its relationships to ideologies of race and multiculturalism. Each precondition is discussed in a separate chapter and in relation to a significant policy event that precipitated the becoming of the Africentric Alternative School. The book utilises an unique feature by developing a ‘subtext’ that accompanies each chapter, whereby the authors reflect upon the theoretical and methodological choices in each corresponding chapter. The book concludes how this particular analysis of education policy can be used to map constellations of power and force that have a large degree of influence over policy subjects and policy actors, in concerted attempts to identify the important preconditions that shape recurring attempts at racial justice.

The Two cines con niño  is the first genre study of Spanish-language child-starred cinemas. It illuminates continuities in the political use of the child protagonist in over fifty years of cinema from Spain and how the child-starred genres use the concept of childhood to define the nation’s past, present, and future. From Francoist popular to oppositional auteur films, and including Latin American cinema, this monograph examines dialogism in aesthetics, narratives, and genre functions. It demonstrates the impact of these narratives within Spanish film history and Francoist biopolitics, as well as providing a broader transatlantic perspective on the genre in select productions from Chile and Argentina. In-depth inquiry within its pages examines films by Pedro Almodóvar, Antonio del Amo, Montxo Armendáriz, Benjamín Ávila, Juan Antonio Bayona, José Luis Cuerda, Guillermo del Toro, Víctor Erice, Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón, Arantxa Lazkano, Luis Lucía, Paula Markovtich, Javier Ruiz Caldera, Carlos Saura, Imanol Uribe, Ladislao Vajda, Agustí Villaronga, and Andrés Wood.

Observing that the division between theory and empiricism remains inextricably linked to imperial modernity, manifest at the most basic level in the binary between "the West" and "Asia," the authors of this volume reexamine art and aesthetics to challenge these oppositions in order to reconceptualize politics and knowledge production in East Asia. Current understandings of fundamental ideas like race, nation, colonizer and the colonized, and the concept of Asia in the region are seeped with imperial aesthetics that originated from competing imperialisms operating in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Such aesthetics has sustained both colonial and local modes of perception in the formation of nation-states and expanded the reach of regulatory powers in East Asia since 1945. The twelve thought-provoking essays in thiscollectiontackle the problematics that arise at the nexus of aesthetics and politics in four areas: theoretical issues of aesthetics and politics in East Asia, aesthetics of affect and sexuality, the productive tension between critical aesthetics and political movements, and aesthetic critiques of sovereignty and neoliberalism in East Asia today. If the seemingly universal operation of capital and militarism in East Asia requires locally specific definitions of biopolitical concepts to function smoothly, this book critiques the circuit of power between the universalism of capital and particularism of nation and culture. Treating aesthetic experiences in art at large as the bases for going beyond imperial categories, the contributors present new modes of sensing, thinking, and living that have been unimaginable within the mainstream modality of Asian studies, a discipline that has reproduced the colonial regime of knowledge production.

Early in their careers, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida argued over madness, reason, and history in an exchange that profoundly influenced continental philosophy and critical theory. In this collection, Amy Allen, Geoffrey Bennington, Lynne Huffer, Colin Koopman, Pierre Macherey, Michael Naas, and Judith Revel, among others, trace this exchange in debates over the possibilities of genealogy and deconstruction, immanent and transcendent approaches to philosophy, and the practical and theoretical role of the archive.

In Foucault's Futures, Penelope Deutscher reconsiders the role of procreation in Foucault's thought, especially its proximity to risk, mortality, and death. She brings together his work on sexuality and biopolitics to challenge our understanding of the politicization of reproduction. By analyzing Foucault's contribution to the politics of maternity and its influence on the work of thinkers such as Roberto Esposito, Giorgio Agamben, and Judith Butler, Deutscher provides new insights into the conflicted political status of reproductive conduct and what it means for feminism and critical theory.

This collection expands scholarly understandings of citizenship in an age in which the material body and its health, vitality, and natural and social environments not only create and discipline the citizen-subject, but also provide the conditions necessary for its recognition and political agency. Together, the chapters consider biocitizenship as a unique mode of biopolitical governance, but also as a response and sometimes a resistance to it. Looking closely at the ways in which the body and citizenship interanimate each other, the collection moves away from biocitizenship as a static form of biomedical subjectivity or category of belonging and redefines it as a dynamic and essential—sometimes generative, and sometimes limiting—element of biopolitics. The book has three primary goals: to serve as the first multidisciplinary forum on biocitizenship, bringing together a variety of voices from different fields (including voices from outside the academy); to redefine biocitizenship as a broad mode of political action linked to health, bodies, and life; and to critically interrogate both the “bio” and “citizenship” of biocitizenship.

Sovereign violence is a dominant issue in contemporary political theory and has attracted much attention from proponents of critical theory, biopolitics, post-structuralism, and deconstruction. While heterogeneous, these commentators are united in rejecting the classic-juridical conception that holds sovereignty to be indivisible and orientated towards the establishment and maintenance of juridical order. This book argues that this rejection has been based on three distinct logics, termed the radical-juridical perspective, the biopolitical one, and the bio-juridical. The first, outlined through chapters on Benjamin, Schmitt, Arendt, and Deleuze and Guattari, offers a number of increasingly radical critiques of the classic-juridical conception of sovereignty, but continues to focus the inquiry around the creation/preservation/disruption of the juridical order. The second biopolitical logic, outlined through chapters on Foucault and Agamben, goes further by undermining the primacy that the classic and radical-juridical models give to law. Instead, sovereign violence is held to be concerned with the regulation of life, with this occurring through exclusion from law. The first two critical logics do, however, set up a binary opposition between law and life: the former affirming the sovereign’s connection to the former, the latter reversing this to claim that it primarily refers to the latter. The third model—called the bio-juridical and developed from Jacques Derrida’s late work on the death penalty—is held to overcome this by developing a compatibilist understanding in which sovereign violence is placed between law and life, simultaneously creating and regulating each through the other.

The Tears of Sovereignty – Perspectives of Power in Renaissance Drama examines the representation of sovereignty in canonical works of the Renaissance: Shakespeare's Richard II, Measure for Measure and The Winter's Tale, Lope de Vega's Fuenteovejuna, and Calderón de la Barca's Life is a Dream. Structured as a series of questions and answers regarding the concept of sovereignty, each chapter is organized around a key representational operation performed on a “body” of power increasingly spectacularized, sacralized, de-sacralized, and, above all, troped in various ways: from the analogical relations of Richard II, through the metaphorical transfers staged in Measure for Measure, to the autoimmune resistances and allegorical returns they give rise to in Lope's Fuenteovejuna, Calderón's Life is a Dream, and Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale. The book's method is comparative and conceptual, linking literary and religious discourse at the level of metaphor, and positing relations between English and Spanish drama, in terms of the “logics” each generates to negotiate the divided terrain of sovereignty. While its tropological approach will be familiar to readers of deconstruction, it also engages with biopolitical, psychoanalytic and feminist criticism, drawing on the work of Giorgio Agamben, Pierre Legendre, Adriana Cavarero and Walter Benjamin, in order to examine the relationship between early modern theater and power from intersecting theoretical perspectives. The “tears” of sovereignty are the exegetical tropes produced and performed on the English stages and Spanish corrales of the seventeenth century through which we continue to view sovereignty.

Contemporary studies of biopolitics tend to assume that the rise of biopolitical governance entails the eclipse of democracy. The abstract egalitarianism of democratic government appears to be incompatible with the concrete, particularist and individualizing operations of biopower. The revival of democracy is then only conceivable as the overcoming of biopolitics. Democratic Biopolitics challenges this interpretation and argues for the possibility of a positive synthesis of biopolitics and democracy, in which both rationalities can positively transform each other. The book identifies the sources of the impasse of the current critique of biopolitics in its broadly Rousseauan orientation that conceives of democratic subject as subtracted from all particular identities, interests or forms of life. In contrast, we argue that democracy is practicable from within particular forms of life as long as their contingency is affirmed and manifested. Drawing on a wide range of authors both belonging to and outside the biopolitics canon, Prozorov develops a vision of democratic biopolitics that consists in the coexistence of diverse and incommensurable forms of life on the basis of their reciprocal recognition as free, equal and in common. He demonstrates the realizability of this vision by addressing its correlates in our lived experience and argues for its sustainability by elucidating the pleasure involved in the freeform, experimental way of living that democracy makes possible.

Although Foucault is certainly one of most influential scholars of our age, law is for Foucauldian scholarship akin to an “undigestable meal”. This is due to a seemingly unresolvable dilemma: how is it possible to analyse law through Foucauldian lenses if Foucault himself claimed (albeit cursorily) that law, in modernity, has been colonised by other disciplines and ousted from the locus of power? Building on Foucault’s ideas about power, freedom, and subjectivity, the present book tackles this problem through a critical genealogy of the philosophico-political ideas at the basis of modern law, delineating the historical emergence of the implicit regulative conditions of our legal present. The book proposes that modern law and modern forms of power – which Foucault termed biopolitical because they sort, train, and tame persons and populations with the aim of normalizing society – developed symbiotically and that, to the extent that modern law establishes the existence of a universal legal subject, law’s functioning is made possible by the homogenization of society through normalising practices. We are however fast moving towards the absolute limit of this normalizing complex. As normalising strategies are progressively unable to homogenise a social body which is increasingly composed by “fluid” subjects, modern law faces two interconnected challenges – a normative one (how can normalizing laws properly reflect the wills of a mass of differentiated fluid individuals?) and a functional one (how can normalizing laws effectively regulate such new protean social body?) – which put into question the very foundations of our legal discourse.

Like much of the globe, the African continent is in the midst of navigating numerous, interwoven environmental challenges. From climate-related risks such as crop failure and famine to longer-term concerns about sustainable urbanization, environmental justice, and biodiversity conservation, African states are charged with addressing a complex range of issues. As this book demonstrates, they are doing so with innovations such as community-based conservation programs and transnational parks, rural development schemes and environmental education initiatives, carbon taxes and pricing for ecosystem services, and significant investments into hydropower, solar, and wind energy. It deploys a theoretical framework for analysing green states in Africa inspired by Michel Foucault and postcolonial theory, which focuses attention on the governance and contestation of land and territory, populations and biopolitics, economies and international relations. Although much of the literature on “green states” has focused on highly developed areas in Europe and North America, this book reveals how central African environmental politics are to the transformation of African states, challenges current understandings of green politics, and explores the ramifications for the rest of the global south.

One of contemporary Italy's most prolific and engaging political theorists, Roberto Esposito has coined a number of critical concepts in current debates about the past, present, and future of biopolitics – from his work on the implications of the etymological and philosophical kinship of community (communitas) and immunity (immunitas) to his theorizations of the impolitical and the impersonal. Terms of Politics: Community, Immunity, and Biopolitics presents a decade of Esposito's thought on the origins and possibilities of political theory. With interlocutors from throughout the western philosophical tradition, from Aristotle and Augustine to Weil and Arendt, Nancy, Foucault, and Agamben, Esposito announces the eclipse of a modern political lexicon–freedom, democracy, sovereignty, and law–that, in its attempt to protect human life, has so often produced its opposite (violence, melancholy, death). Terms of Politics calls for the opening of political thought toward a resignification of these and other operative terms such as community, immunity, biopolitics, and the impersonal in ways that are life affirming rather than life negating. An invaluable introduction to the breadth and rigor of Esposito's thought, the book will also welcome readers already familiar with Esposito's characteristic skill in overturning and breaking open the language of politics.

Elephants rarely breed in captivity and are not considered domesticated, yet they interact with people regularly and adapt to various environments. Too social and sagacious to be objects, too strange to be human, too captive to truly be wild, but too wild to be domesticated—where do elephants fall in our understanding of nature? In Wildlife in the Anthropocene, Jamie Lorimer argues that the idea of nature as a pure and timeless place characterized by the absence of humans has come to an end. But life goes on. Wildlife inhabits everywhere and is on the move; Lorimer proposes the concept of wildlife as a replacement for nature. Offering a thorough appraisal of the Anthropocene—an era in which human actions affect and influence all life and all systems on our planet—Lorimer unpacks its implications for changing definitions of nature and the politics of wildlife conservation. Wildlife in the Anthropocene examines rewilding, the impacts of wildlife films, human relationships with charismatic species, and urban wildlife. Analyzing scientific papers, policy documents, and popular media, as well as a decade of fieldwork, Lorimer explores the new interconnections between science, politics, and neoliberal capitalism that the Anthropocene demands of wildlife conservation. Imagining conservation in a world where humans are geological actors entangled within and responsible for powerful, unstable, and unpredictable planetary forces, this work nurtures a future environmentalism that is more hopeful and democratic.

Three decades of biodiversity governance have largely failed to stop the ongoing environmental crisis of global species loss. Yet that governance has resulted in undeniably important political outcomes. In Counting Species, Rafi Youatt argues that the understanding of global biodiversity has produced a distinct vision and politics of nature, one that is bound up with ideas about species, norms of efficiency, and apolitical forms of technical management. Since its inception in the 1980s, biodiversity’s political power has also hinged on its affiliation with a series of political concepts. Biodiversity was initially articulated as a moral crime against the intrinsic value of all species. In the 1990s and early 2000s, biodiversity shifted toward an association with service provision in a globalizing world economy before attaching itself more recently to the discourses of security and resilience. Even as species extinctions continue, biodiversity’s role in environmental governance has become increasingly abstract. Yet the power of global biodiversity is eventually always localized and material when it encounters nonhuman life. In these encounters, Youatt finds reasons for optimism, tracing some of the ways that nonhuman life has escaped human social means. Counting Species compellingly offers both a political account of global biodiversity and a unique approach to political agency across the human–nonhuman divide.

The word “biology” was first used to describe the scientific study of life in 1802, and as Davide Tarizzo demonstrates, our understanding of what being alive means is an equally recent invention. Circumventing tired debates about the validity of science and the truth of Darwinian evolution, Tarizzo instead envisions a profound paradigm shift in philosophical and scientific concepts of biological life.

The book traces the interactions of American allopathic medicine, industrial capitalism, and the human desire for sleep from the late 18^th century through the turn of the 21^st century. The foundation of contemporary American sleep is laid in the 19^th century, when industrial workday demands the coordination and consolidation of sleeping and waking patterns. What was lost in this transition was unconsolidated sleep – instead of two nightly periods of rest, or daily naps supplemented with nightly sleep, one eight hour period of sleep was substituted as a new norm. This norm laid the basis for the emerging field of sleep medicine, which took as its primary concern the eradication of napping and insomnia, and substituting eight regular and consolidated hours of sleep. This invention of consolidated sleep led to the eventual pathologization of many forms of sleep, and provided the basis for contemporary sleep medicine. The present interest in sleep, exemplified by advertising campaigns for “Z drugs” – a new chemical that promotes and consolidates sleep – is not so much new as an intensification of a two hundred year old interest in making “normal” American sleep. In the present, I focus on the lives of physicians, scientists, patients and their families as they deal with the social frictions that sleep disorders are accepted as causing. I argue in the conclusion that by recognizing the human limits of sleep, we can apprehend sleep’s variations as non-pathological, and that with more flexible social institutions and expectations, the medicalization of sleep might be subverted.

Life, Emergent advocates for an affirmative life-politic that places the social squarely in the ‘meaning of life’, animating contemporary theory and practice on life in unexplored terrains. It privileges the social by exploring life-worlds of mass violence and questions the ability of the bio-political paradigm to contain a politics of life in the biological. What does an inquiry into life from the ‘social’ look like? Life, as it lives or dies in conditions of violence, in its momentum after damage, inscribes an emerging, dynamic, fluid, ever-changing explosion of relationalities in the cognizable realm called society. While the making and unmaking of life unfolds through these relationalities, so does the making and unmaking of the social. In privileging the social, this book intervenes in the bio-political paradigm and questions its ability to exhaust the ‘meaning of life’.