If these books share a thesis, it is that Americanists should begin considering the fleshly body as the site for an agential alternative to biopolitics. For these three authors, biopolitics concerns the domination of living bodies (particularly black, female, queer bodies) by capitalist and white supremacist regimes of power and knowledge. Each book reexamines the stuff making up those living bodies—whether cast as recalcitrant material, habeas viscus, or sensational flesh—to consider how they might enable resistance to biopolitical regimes.
Proposing that the era of the linguistic/cultural turn has reached its terminus, Breu’s Insistence of the Material astutely foregrounds the body as both the regulatory target of biopolitics and as a resistive object, never fully constituted by power, that offers a potential springboard for resistance. For Breu, biopolitical theory assembles a diverse corpus of thought—new materalisms, object-oriented ontology, but also Lacanian psychoanalysis and Marxist historical materialism—with which to investigate the...
