Race, biopolitics, and the future: Introduction to the special section

Abstract

We wrote the proposal for this special issue at the beginning of 2015. From our institutional home in the United States South, daily life, class discussions, and academic work felt saturated with biopoltical questions. The year 2014 had ended with waves of protests against racialized police violence and the pervasive criminalization of Black communities and protests had coalesced around a provocative set of signifiers. The #BlackLivesMatter movement, originally a response to the July 2013 acquittal of unarmed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin's vigilante killer in Florida gained the silent ''hands up, don't shoot'' gesture in reference to the August 2014 fatal shooting of unarmed teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, by a police officer subsequently acquitted by a grand jury. That winter, a New York City policeman was acquitted by a grand jury despite videotaped evidence of the July 2014 choking of Eric Garner, and t-shirts worn at protests and at sporting events called us to remember Garner's last words: ''I can't breathe.'' In each case, the loss of a young black man's life was followed by a second symbolic death, in the highlighting of the victim's supposed flaws and mistakes and the subsequent failure to hold anyone accountable for the death. A growing litany of these police killings was then given intersectional nuance by #SayHerName's recounting of Black female, queer and trans victims who had not only been subject to violence but then omitted from the public recounting. The names of Sandra Bland, Renisha McBride, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, Freddy Gray, Philando Castille, and too many others signal particular lives valued and mourned, but also indicate a repetition and wearing down of life. We wrote the proposal with ferocious anger and with the Movement for Black Lives in mind as an expression of righteous fury at state violence that cuts directly to the heart of race-biopolitics.Two years later, as we write this introduction, Donald Trump takes the office of US President. He promises to wall out Mexican and Latin American migrants, expel or register Muslims, and restore white nationalism. According to the United Nations Refugee Agency, four million refugees have left Syria since 2011, and more than six million were internally displaced at the end of 2016 (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, 2017), but in the political discourse of the US 2016 elections, refugees were figured as security threat rather than as a humanitarian crisis engendered in part by US geopolitical strategy. Likewise, migrants crossing the US-Mexico border were figured as

The domestic geopolitics of racial capitalism

“…The degradation of industrial production zones is justified in terms of the “national good”—whether explicitly geopolitical, as with Badin’s wartime aluminum production, or implicitly so, as with Flint and the automobile industry’s importance to US economic power. Such nationalist discourses enact a territorial imaginary that erases racialized people from the national body, even as they are “confined … to zones of death and sacrifice in service to white futurity ” (Smith and Vasudevan, 2017). The sacrifice demanded for the nation-state may be literal, as in the irradiation of Indigenous peoples through nuclear test sites, an internal colonialism that extends militarization into everyday life 3 (Taylor, 2014).…”

Black matters are spatial matters: Black geographies for the twenty‐first century

“…Our current political moment has made this work all the more urgent (Smith & Vasudevan, ). The pressing need for Black Geographies is evinced in the disproportionate impacts of climate change on Black communities; the surveillance and policing of Black neighborhoods; and the new configurations of anti‐Black racism, nationalism, and xenophobia represented by the global resurgence of the far‐right.…”

Bordering through recalibration: Exploring the temporality of the German “Ausbildungsduldung”

“…In her book In the Meantime , Sharma (2014) takes departure from past years’ engagements with speed and acceleration within the social sciences. Based on Massey’s (1994) critique of universalizing discourses of “time-space compression,” Sharma criticizes “common-sense notions of universal temporal acceleration under neoliberalism” (Smith and Vasudevan, 2017: 213). What is “shared across the temporal differential is not so much the general speed of life” (Sharma, 2014: 18) she argues, but rather an expectation that people synchronize their pace, practices, and experiences of time to speed as a powerful discourse and temporal order.…”