The postcolony, it is said, is the site of great violence. Power is customarily exerted in the service of death, not life; bodies, not minds, are the central objects of its operations. Life is qualitatively different, worse: the absurd trumps the rational, phantasmagoria and spectacle reign, the body is in constant pain, life is wretched, and freedom is ephemeral. It is said. In his article “Necropolitics,” and in an attempt to trace a new genealogy of state power, Achille Mbembe (2003) observes the continued operation of necropolitics in the contemporary postcolony, against the claim (Foucauldian but not necessarily held by Foucault) that sovereign power has receded in modernity. Necropolitics, here, describes the generalized instrumentalization and material destruction of human bodies in the global South. It fosters death-worlds in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life that essentially confer upon them the status of “living dead.” The...
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