
Sovereign Bodies
Citizens, Migrants, and States in the Postcolonial World
Princeton University Press
Published on 1. May 2005
Book
Hardback
360 pages
978-0-691-12118-5 (ISBN)
Description
9/11 and its aftermath have shown that our ideas about what constitutes sovereign power lag dangerously behind the burgeoning claims to rights and recognition within and across national boundaries. New configurations of sovereignty are at the heart of political and cultural transformations globally. "Sovereign Bodies" shifts the debate on sovereign power away from territoriality and external recognition of state power, toward the shaping of sovereign power through the exercise of violence over human bodies and populations. In this volume, sovereign power, whether exercised by a nation-state or by a local despotic power or community, is understood and scrutinized as something tentative and unstable whose efficacy depends less on formal rules than on repeated acts of violence.Following the editors' introduction are fourteen essays by leading scholars from around the globe that analyze cultural meanings of sovereign power and violence, as well as practices of citizenship and belonging - in South Africa, Peru, India, Mexico, Cyprus, Norway, and also among transnational Chinese and Indian populations.
"Sovereign Bodies" enriches our understanding of power and sovereignty in the postcolonial world and in "the West" while opening new conceptual fields in the anthropology of politics. The contributors are Ana Maria Alonso, Lars Buur, Partha Chatterjee, Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, Oivind Fuglerud, Thomas Blom Hansen, Barry Hindess, Steffen Jensen, Achille Mbembe, Aihwa Ong, Finn Stepputat, Simon Turner, Peter van der Veer, and Yael Navaro-Yashin.
"Sovereign Bodies" enriches our understanding of power and sovereignty in the postcolonial world and in "the West" while opening new conceptual fields in the anthropology of politics. The contributors are Ana Maria Alonso, Lars Buur, Partha Chatterjee, Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, Oivind Fuglerud, Thomas Blom Hansen, Barry Hindess, Steffen Jensen, Achille Mbembe, Aihwa Ong, Finn Stepputat, Simon Turner, Peter van der Veer, and Yael Navaro-Yashin.
Reviews / Votes
"This invigorating and intellectually stimulating book promises to reinvent the very questions we ask about the practice, object, and experience of the political in the post-national age that is coming ever more sharply into view. The authors provide a serviceable and relevant theoretical horizon not only for a moribund political anthropology but for a sclerotic political science as well. By placing the problem of sovereignty at the heart of political projects of all kinds, and by focusing on violence as the principle means by which such projects are contingently realized, they have provided scholars of the post-colonial world with a new set of conceptual tools to think about power beyond the state." - Eric Worby, Yale University"More details
Language
English
Place of publication
New Jersey
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
College/higher education
Product notice
Trade binding
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Weight
652 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-691-12118-5 (9780691121185)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

Thomas Blom Hansen | Finn Stepputat
Sovereign Bodies
Citizens, Migrants, and States in the Postcolonial World
E-Book
01/2009
1st Edition
Princeton University Press
€171.95
Available for download

Thomas Blom Hansen | Finn Stepputat
Sovereign Bodies
Citizens, Migrants, and States in the Postcolonial World
Book
04/2005
Princeton University Press
€39.80
Article not available at the moment
Persons
Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat previously coedited "States of Imagination: Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State". Hansen is Professor of Anthropology at Yale University. His recent books include "Wages of Violence: Naming and Identity in Postcolonial Bombay" and "The Saffron Wave: Democracy and Hindu Nationalism in Modern India" (both Princeton). Stepputat is Senior Researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies.
Content
Preface vii List of Contributors ix Introduction 1 Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat RACE, LAW, AND CITIZENSHIP Territorializing the Nation and "Integrating the Indian": "Mestizaje" in Mexican Official Discourses and Public Culture by Ana Maria Alonso 39 Violence, Sovereignty, and Citizenship in Postcolonial Peru by Finn Stepputat 61 Sovereign Violence and the Domain of the Political by Partha Chatterjee 82 DEATH, ANXIETY, AND RITUALS OF STATE Confinement and the Imagination: Sovereignty and Subjectivity in a Quasi-State Yael Navaro-Yashin 103 Naturing the Nation: Aliens, Apocalypse, and the Postcolonial State by Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff 120 Sovereignty as a Form of Expenditure by Achille Mbembe 148 BODY, LOCALITY, AND INFORMAL SOVEREIGNTY Sovereigns beyond the State: On Legality and Authority in Urban India by Thomas Blom Hansen 169 The Sovereign Outsourced: Local Justice and Violence in Port Elizabeth by Lars Buur 192 Above the Law: Practices of Sovereignty in Surrey Estate, Cape Town by Steffen Jensen 218 POSTCOLONIAL CITIZENSHIP IN THE EMPIRE Citizenship and Empire by Barry Hindess 241 Splintering Cosmopolitanism: Asian Immigrants and Zones of Autonomy in the American West by Aihwa Ong 257 Virtual India: Indian IT Labor and the Nation-State by Peter van der Veer 276 Inside Out: The Reorganization of National Identity in Norway ivind Fuglerud 291 Suspended Spaces--Contesting Sovereignties in a Refugee Camp by Simon Turner 312 Bibliography 333 Index 363