The four papers as interrelated “case studies” examine the emancipatory potential of necropolitics as a theory for illuminating hidden relationships between violence, the state, and the individual.
The session begins with Young’s study of Fenimore Cooper’s The Deerslayer, which argues that the novel’s human-gun relationship reveals a vision of necropolitical sovereignty that gives the lie to contemporary sociological framings of the United States’ contemporary “self-defensive” gun culture as one that can be uncoupled from settler colonial violence. If tracing the origins of our “Gunfighter Nation” to the frontier violence romanticized in Cooper’s fiction is a familiar enough of a scholarly story, the sweeping narrative provided by Richard Slotkin and the new American studies did not take up the specifics of the human-gun relationship as its primary focus. This paper will take that focus up in a reading of The Deerslayer that attends to Leatherstocking’s racially mediated relationship to firearms.
The analysis of violence and masculinity continues in Weaver-Hightower’s paper, which examines how the concept of necropolitics illuminates tensions in 19th and early 20th-century anglophone settler gold mining literature, the subject of her third in-progress monograph. Many mining texts show gold fields as liberatory spaces of masculine community, where only hard work and luck separate (almost always white) men from fortune. Violence and death are a man’s right—to risk his life in pursuit of fortune, to kill to protect his property or exclude (mostly Chinese) competition, and to resist state control (like the Eureka Stockade revolt). Mbembe’s arguments, however, remind us how this seemingly liberatory site where violence is allowed is in many senses a space where state-sponsored violence is enacted. As historians note, settler states encouraged mining and sponsored gold rushes to encourage European settlement and increase their sovereignty over contested space. Thus this paper examines tensions between stories of emancipatory violence and state-sponsored violence as played out in the pursuit of gold.
Shifting from US American geographies to British India, the next paper expands the examination of necropolitics and violence as a tool of sovereignty in Kipling’s 1901 colonial novel Kim. In “Necropolitics” Mbembe notes that “the links between modernity and terror spring from multiple sources,” and one through-line that Lagji traces is between colonial small wars and counterinsurgency technologies. Inspired by Mbembe’s note that “colonies are similar to frontiers,” Lagji’s paper, which grows out of her research for her monograph-in-progress, combines the rich intellectual history of the frontier from scholars of the American West with the production of the “frontier” in counterinsurgency discourses. While Kim does not depict explicit counterinsurgent violence, Kipling’s characters voice ideologies of imperial military policy consistent with his contemporary Major Callwell’s Small Wars; both the latter military manual and Kim authorize the unqualified use of force to suppress revolts against colonial power.
The session’s final paper truly explores the emancipatory potential of necropolitics by focusing on Mbembe’s call to advocacy at the end of his book through “the ethics of the passerby.” Sevcik’s paper develops a framework of “creative insurgency,” which she is employing in her current monograph, to argue that women’s activist art constitutes a form of resistance to necropolitical regimes. She draws from recent examples from women in Tunisia and Syria who deploy their art and bodies against state power in an orientation of “solidarity and detachment, but never of indifference” that emerges from movement between places.
At the conclusion of the 12-minute papers, the session organizer will lead a guided discussion and field questions for the panelists, asking the audience to not just respond to the case studies presented but to also consider how their own work has/has not been “emancipated” by Mbembe’s elastic theories.