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Contribution to Book
From the “Bio” to the “Necro”: The Human at the Border
Resisting Biopolitics: Philosophical, Political and Performative Strategies (2015)
  • Andrés Fabián Henao Castro, University of Massachusetts Boston
Abstract
This chapter puts biopolitics in conversation with decolonial theory in order to investigate the disavowed colonial history of necropolitics at the center of modernity’s continuous racialization of “Man.” It further develops Achille Mbembe’s influential notion of necropolitics by tracing its origins to the colonial principle of power: ‘make die let die,’ and by understanding this new technology of power as the de-humanization device by which the human is divided across color lines. Such de-humanization, the chapter concludes, is prominent in the global production of unauthorized immigrants as disposable people through the necropolitical dispositif of the border. This technology of power makes the lives of people of color more vulnerable to death, their deaths more vulnerable to symbolic invisibility, and the material and symbolic intensification of such death multiplied in the fabrication of death-worlds in their territories of origin in the global south.
Keywords
  • Necropolitics,
  • Biopolitics,
  • De-Colonial theory,
  • Undocumented Immigrants
Publication Date
September 15, 2015
Editor
Stephen Wilmer and Audronė Žukauskaitė
Publisher
Routledge
ISBN
978-1138789487
Citation Information
Andrés Fabián Henao Castro. "From the “Bio” to the “Necro”: The Human at the Border" New YorkResisting Biopolitics: Philosophical, Political and Performative Strategies (2015)
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/andres_fabian_henao_castro/40/