The Inner Life of Race: Souls, Bodies, and the History of Racial Power

by Leerom Medovoi

In The Inner Life of Race, Leerom Medovoi turns away from conventional views of race as a politics of the phenotypical body to theorize race instead as a politics of populational threat. Racism’s genealogy, argues Medovoi, invokes longstanding theological distinctions between the body and the soul. While the body can be seen and marked, the soul signals potentially threatening dangerous intentions, beliefs, or desires. Race is the power-effect of reading the body in order to police the political threat of the soul. Medovoi’s genealogy begins with medieval deployments of inquisition and confession to wage war against heretics, infidels, and their threat to the salvation of souls. In early modern Spain, these pastoral technologies of power catalyzed the invention of race as a language for the danger of formerly Jewish and Muslim converts. Medovoi shows how this discourse expanded into anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity throughout the colonial world and modern Europe, laying the foundation for racialized capitalism and liberal governmentality. Medovoi weaves histories of color-line racism, nativism, Islamophobia, antisemitism, and anticommunism into a pathbreaking account of the political work populational racism accomplishes.

296 pages, Paperback

Published September 13, 2024

About the author

Leerom Medovoi is a Professor and Head of the Department of English at the University of Arizona. A graduate of the Ph.D. program in Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford University, he was the founding director of the Portland Center for Public Humanities and is currently a member of the PMLA editorial board. He is the author of Rebels: Youth and the Cold War Origins of Identity (Duke 2005), and has published in the areas of global American studies, biopolitical theory, critical race theory, and ecocriticism. He is the principal investigator for a collaborative, three-year Mellon Foundation research grant through the Consortium of Humanities Center and Institutes on the topic of "Religion, Secularism, and Political Belonging in a Global Age." Lee is currently at work on two book-length projects titled: The Second Axis of Race: Biopolitics of the Dogma Line and Global Allegoresis and World-System Literature.

Reviews

[Samara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fabulous