Sovereignty Unhinged: An Illustrated Primer for the Study of Present Intensities, Disavowals, and Temporal Derangements
Sovereignty Unhinged theorizes sovereignty beyond the typical understandings of action, control, and the nation-state. Rather than engaging with the geopolitical realities of the present, the contributors consider sovereignty from the perspective of how it is lived and enacted in everyday practice and how it reflects people’s aspirations for new futures. In a series of ethnographic case studies ranging from the Americas to the Middle East to South Asia, they examine the means of avoiding the political and historical capture that make one complicit with sovereign authority rather than creating the conditions of possibility to confront it. The contributors attend to the affective dimensions of these practices of world-building to illuminate the epistemological, ontological, and transnational entanglements that produce a sense of what is possible. They also trace how sovereignty is activated and deactivated over the course of a lifetime within the struggle of the everyday. In so doing, they outline how individuals create and enact forms of sovereignty that allow them to endure fast and slow forms of violence while embracing endless opportunities for building new worlds.

Contributors. Alex Blanchette, Yarimar Bonilla, Jessica Cattelino, María Elena García, Akhil Gupta, Lochlann Jain, Purnima Mankekar, Joseph Masco, Michael Ralph, Danilyn Rutherford, Arjun Shankar, Kristen L. Simmons, Deborah A. Thomas, Leniqueca A. Welcome, Kaya Naomi Williams, Jessica Winegar
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Sovereignty Unhinged: An Illustrated Primer for the Study of Present Intensities, Disavowals, and Temporal Derangements
Sovereignty Unhinged theorizes sovereignty beyond the typical understandings of action, control, and the nation-state. Rather than engaging with the geopolitical realities of the present, the contributors consider sovereignty from the perspective of how it is lived and enacted in everyday practice and how it reflects people’s aspirations for new futures. In a series of ethnographic case studies ranging from the Americas to the Middle East to South Asia, they examine the means of avoiding the political and historical capture that make one complicit with sovereign authority rather than creating the conditions of possibility to confront it. The contributors attend to the affective dimensions of these practices of world-building to illuminate the epistemological, ontological, and transnational entanglements that produce a sense of what is possible. They also trace how sovereignty is activated and deactivated over the course of a lifetime within the struggle of the everyday. In so doing, they outline how individuals create and enact forms of sovereignty that allow them to endure fast and slow forms of violence while embracing endless opportunities for building new worlds.

Contributors. Alex Blanchette, Yarimar Bonilla, Jessica Cattelino, María Elena García, Akhil Gupta, Lochlann Jain, Purnima Mankekar, Joseph Masco, Michael Ralph, Danilyn Rutherford, Arjun Shankar, Kristen L. Simmons, Deborah A. Thomas, Leniqueca A. Welcome, Kaya Naomi Williams, Jessica Winegar
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Sovereignty Unhinged: An Illustrated Primer for the Study of Present Intensities, Disavowals, and Temporal Derangements

Sovereignty Unhinged: An Illustrated Primer for the Study of Present Intensities, Disavowals, and Temporal Derangements

Sovereignty Unhinged: An Illustrated Primer for the Study of Present Intensities, Disavowals, and Temporal Derangements
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Sovereignty Unhinged: An Illustrated Primer for the Study of Present Intensities, Disavowals, and Temporal Derangements

Sovereignty Unhinged: An Illustrated Primer for the Study of Present Intensities, Disavowals, and Temporal Derangements

Overview

Sovereignty Unhinged theorizes sovereignty beyond the typical understandings of action, control, and the nation-state. Rather than engaging with the geopolitical realities of the present, the contributors consider sovereignty from the perspective of how it is lived and enacted in everyday practice and how it reflects people’s aspirations for new futures. In a series of ethnographic case studies ranging from the Americas to the Middle East to South Asia, they examine the means of avoiding the political and historical capture that make one complicit with sovereign authority rather than creating the conditions of possibility to confront it. The contributors attend to the affective dimensions of these practices of world-building to illuminate the epistemological, ontological, and transnational entanglements that produce a sense of what is possible. They also trace how sovereignty is activated and deactivated over the course of a lifetime within the struggle of the everyday. In so doing, they outline how individuals create and enact forms of sovereignty that allow them to endure fast and slow forms of violence while embracing endless opportunities for building new worlds.

Contributors. Alex Blanchette, Yarimar Bonilla, Jessica Cattelino, María Elena García, Akhil Gupta, Lochlann Jain, Purnima Mankekar, Joseph Masco, Michael Ralph, Danilyn Rutherford, Arjun Shankar, Kristen L. Simmons, Deborah A. Thomas, Leniqueca A. Welcome, Kaya Naomi Williams, Jessica Winegar

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781478023715
Publisher: Duke University Press
Publication date: 01/18/2023
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 360
File size: 49 MB
Note: This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Deborah A. Thomas is R. Jean Brownlee Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation: Sovereignty, Witnessing, Repair, also published by Duke University Press.

Joseph Masco is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago and author of The Future of Fallout, and Other Episodes in Radioactive World-Making, also published by Duke University Press.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments  vii
Introduction. Feeling Unhinged / Joseph Masco and Deborah A. Thomas  1
Part I. Capture/Escape
1. Love and Disgust: Sovereignty Struggles in Egypt’s Uprising / Jessica Winegar  27
2. Tasting Sovereignty: Love and Revolution in Peru / María Elena García  45
3. Death and Disavowal / Deborah A. Thomas  71
4. Pandemic Déjà Vu / Yarimar Bonilla  88
Interlude I. Wading in the Thick: A Sovereign Encounter through Collage / Leniqueca A. Welcome  96
Part II. Breaking/Making
5. Affective Sovereignties: Mobility, Emplacement, Potentiality / Purnima Mankekar and Akhil Gupta  113
6. Sovereign Interdependencies / Jessica Cattelino  139
7. Moral Economies, Developmentalist Sovereignty, and Affective Strain / Arjun Shankar  162
8. The Slaughterhouse after Surplus Value / Alex Blanchette  185
Interlude 2. The Lung Is a Bird and a Fish / Lochlann Jain  211
Part III. Exclusion/Embrace
9. i was dreaming when i wrote this: a mixtape for America / Kristen L. Simmons and Kaya Naomi Williams  241
10. The Sovereignty of Vulnerability / Danilyn Rutherford  263
11. The Condition of Our Condition / Joseph Masco  277
Afterword / Michael Ralph  297
References  307
Contributors  333
Index  339

What People are Saying About This

The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence - Laurence Ralph

“This remarkable edited volume reformulates sovereignty into a framework for understanding the ‘psychic and affective dimensions of historical experience.’ When viewed through this novel lens, sovereignty feels unhinged. And yet the volume’s editors, Deborah A. Thomas and Joseph Masco, do not leave us in the lurch. Carefully navigating their readers through the hysteria of these times, they curate an all-star cast who ultimately transform their individual scholarship into a collective prayer to strengthen our commitment to change.”

Between Gaia and Ground: Four Axioms of Existence and the Ancestral Catastrophe of Late Liberalism - Elizabeth A. Povinelli

“A collection of some of anthropology’s finest thinkers and ethnographers gather to turn Western philosophies of sovereignty and its autonomous self-authoring subject inside out. From within these disgorged entrails, Sovereignty Unhinged celebrates multiple new forms of bodies and governance. A coherent masterful exercise in ‘collective thought.’”

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Social Sciences
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Socio-Cultural Anthropology - General & Miscellaneous

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