Rethinking Sovereignty through Hashtag Publics: The New Body Politics

Time and Relational Possibility: Cultural Anthropology in 2017

“…Kamari Clarke's () and Amahl Bishara's () contributions to this Cultural Anthropology collection on sovereignty, along with essays published elsewhere on how silence and listening mediate power and how sovereignty and citizenship implicate intimate relations, bridge the concerns in this section (temporality, mobility, and sovereignty) with those in the next (relationality, subjectivity, and mediation). Clarke emphasizes how citizens mediate sovereignty via technologies and bodies, while Victoria Bernal (), also looking at technological mediation, asks how we might make sense of silences when we are accustomed to instead attending to that which is explicitly spoken.…”

“…A Cultural Anthropology Retrospectives series on sovereignty takes stock of the multiple ways anthropologists have drawn on and challenged the concept as they have sought to theorize power and authority through epistemic objects like globalization, the state, settler colonialism, and the body (Bishara ; Bonilla ; Clarke ; Kauanui ; Sturm ). In her contribution, Yarimar Bonilla () emphasizes that sovereignty, having emerged as a concept from Western political thought in the context of empire, is not neutral and as such must itself be interrogated.…”

Sovereignty: An Introduction

“…She begins by offering a selective genealogy of the concept of sovereignty in relation to both Foucault's and Agamben's works. Foucault's interventions in the interdisciplinary social sciences enabled new understandings of political authority, sovereignty, the state, and power, which “revolutionized anthropological thinking” (Clarke , 362). Foucault, Clarke (, 363) writes, “expanded and decentralized a view of sovereignty and legitimate power that had led to many decades of writing about how power is produced and how it produces certain effects.” Then Agamben proposed a renewed focus on state violence that accounted for biopower at the site of the camp as a prime example of the state of exception.…”

“…Foucault's interventions in the interdisciplinary social sciences enabled new understandings of political authority, sovereignty, the state, and power, which “revolutionized anthropological thinking” (Clarke , 362). Foucault, Clarke (, 363) writes, “expanded and decentralized a view of sovereignty and legitimate power that had led to many decades of writing about how power is produced and how it produces certain effects.” Then Agamben proposed a renewed focus on state violence that accounted for biopower at the site of the camp as a prime example of the state of exception. Noting the fractures of that account through spaces of exception and transformations of the body politic, Clarke (, 361) suggests that new reflections on sovereignty demand a shift in the way we understand governance “through new ways of constituting bodies of persons through technological forms of bodily mediation.” In turn, she encourages us to resituate our understanding of political authority through the force field of bio‐mediated politics.…”

“…Foucault, Clarke (, 363) writes, “expanded and decentralized a view of sovereignty and legitimate power that had led to many decades of writing about how power is produced and how it produces certain effects.” Then Agamben proposed a renewed focus on state violence that accounted for biopower at the site of the camp as a prime example of the state of exception. Noting the fractures of that account through spaces of exception and transformations of the body politic, Clarke (, 361) suggests that new reflections on sovereignty demand a shift in the way we understand governance “through new ways of constituting bodies of persons through technological forms of bodily mediation.” In turn, she encourages us to resituate our understanding of political authority through the force field of bio‐mediated politics. Her contribution highlights the importance of anthropologists returning to a focus on the body as “an important analytic for making sense of new forms of mediation” (Clarke , 360).…”