Towards a Global Genealogy of Biopolitics: Race, Colonialism, and Biometrics beyond Europe

Abstract

This paper examines, at the global scale, the biopolitical strategy of racism that Foucault articulated in the context of 19th-century Europe. Through my historical analysis both of the emergent notion of race and of biometric production of racial knowledge during Japanese colonialism, I endeavour to delineate a circulation of a political rationality of modern racism, which became globally generalised and constitutive of the formation of a non-Western nation-state. I argue that this emergence of global biopolitics, however, should not simply be reduced to a unitary operation but needs to be understood as the process of multiplication that reveals both the continuity and the contingency of the biopolitical strategy of racism in relation to particular spatiotemporal configurations. Furthermore, through an archaeological reading of Foucault on modern racism, I will suggest that Foucault's Society Must be Defended, albeit arguably underdeveloped in its geographical scope of analysis, can shed light on the operation of biopolitics and modern racism beyond the history of Europe.

Infrastructure of compassionate repression: making sense of biometrics in Kakuma refugee camp

“…Although this trend has gained momentum since the 1990s, the usage of technological assemblages to shape processes of inclusion and exclusion is a legacy of colonial administrative methods aimed at rendering legible, and therefore more manageable, the subjected populations. In colonial contexts, 'the recognizing of humans on the basis of intrinsic physical or behavioral traits' (Maguire, 2009, p. 9) was used for 'identification, classification, and hierarchisation of bodies, simultaneously demarcating populations' (Nishiyama, 2015; see also Pugliese, 2010).…”

Crowd surveillance: The (in)securitization of the urban body

“…Historically, prototypes of contemporary biometric technologies had been widely used to calculate the inferiority and criminality of nonwhite bodies, as well as to monitor and manage slaves and colonial subjects (Browne, 2015;Cole, 2001;Pugliese, 2010). The Eurocentric deployment of biometrics as a colonial and racial technology was also translated to Japan during the imperial period whereby the logic of modern racism was multiplied (Nishiyama, 2015). Even in the present context when these colonial technologies were denounced as "pseudo-sciences," surveillance technologies continue to have racialized logics.…”

“…Noticeably, while figures of people in the first three categories of crowd behaviour include both men and women who all appear with a light skin colour, people in the final category are all men with a dark skin. It has been argued that skin colour is a contested notion in the understanding of racism in Japan (Weiner, 2009) and its relation to biopolitics (Nishiyama, 2015). Yet this is not to say that racism associated with skin colour is non-existent in the country.…”

Race, debt and empire: Racialising the Newfoundland financial crisis of 1933

“…The Royal Commission's encounter with Newfoundland's disparate peoples was filtered through theories of eugenics and racial degeneration. In the early 1900s racial degeneration was a topic of concern in Britain, its empire, Western Europe, North America and beyond (Bottomley, ; Campbell, ; Mazumdar, ; Nishiyama, ; Turda, ). As a social philosophy that purported to improve and control human genetic development, eugenics belonged to the political vocabulary of “virtually every significant modernizing force between the two world wars.…”