Full Description
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
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
