ABSTRACT
Césaire was writing about the dismemberment of the black body that colonization (and not just colonialism) requires to constitute its modern and imperial sovereing project(s) in the world. Tingvall argued that it is important to use cadavers to assess the damage on a living human in a crash. Both authors point to bodies. What are the stakes in centralizing and asking questions about which bodies matter today in world politics? How do practices, places, and projects of the macabre become resources for world imperial leadership and its managers who articulate them as mere accidents or natural disasters? More specifically, how do such practices and interventions come to be understood and engaged daily as such, especially at moments of environmental accident and disaster by dominant neo-colonial global capitalism and its contingent liberal epistemologies? How does the prioritization of the social-ontological gratuitous violence that would eradicate anything and anybody that encroaches on the reckless adventures of neo-colonial imperialsovereignty in its pursuit of profit reduce, attenuate, and limit people’s
creative vitality to contest the conditions of their existential extermination? If we take a closer look at specific sites of accident and disaster, these ecologies and bodies-the cadavers and the “poor devils” who are lynched, terrorized, and colonized-are integral and foundational to the production of neoimperialism, not temporary moments in the social relations of development. The dominant logics that embody disasters and accidents disrupt an active
and systemic engagement with the politics that made them possible and the conditions from which they emerge, including the social relations of capital, and generate an incredulity that precludes our intervention. The politics of such spatio-temporal formations is made invisible in the discussions of disaster and reproduce the invisibility of (neo) colonial-imperial projects. But even as (neo) liberal theorists repeatedly articulate ecologies including
bodies and places in this way, bodies (i.e., the white, the working class, the queer, the sexed, the Muselmanic body, etc.) and ecologies betray and reveal the geographies/spatiality of violence. These “accidental” formations exceed and break the banks of epistemological and ontological boundaries of those geopolitical projects that claim that some people are ontologically limited. Thus, any violence such as their segregation, exploitation, extraction of profits through their labor, and, ultimately, their deaths, are justified. Consequently, engaging the seeming “disasters” and “accidents” and the
production of bodies and ecologies requires that we answer the following questions: What is at stake in the articulation of capitalist modernity and neoimperialism? Why do modernity and imperialism require the asymmetrical ontological and geopolitical segregation of the world and the production of bodies and ecologies as accidents and disasters? How do such disasters and accidents, including the existence of specific bodies as living dead and ecologies as dead matter become strategically crucial for the restructuring of the intimate/ national/international/imperial conjunctures? In this chapter, I explore why the major stakes in the articulation of capitalist modernity, and imperial sovereignty, are evident in the struggles over the materiality and the definition of polities, governmentalities, bodies, ecologies, life, and death. This chapter comprises three parts. First, I outline the contemporary geo-
political and economic forces that are propelling the intensification of ecologies and bodies as social “accidents,” “disasters,” and “exceptional” formations (e.g., Bhopal and Hurricane Katrina) by developing my argument about the economies of blackness. This epistemological framework, which allows us to foreground the spatial formation of (neo) colonial imperialisms as context and conditions, and also as embodied/contingent struggles, practices, and social relations, allows us to read next to each other the “descriptive spatial facts” of sites such as Bhopal and Katrina. It also provides us with the conceptual frames to understand the shifts in spatio-temporal formations, for example, the ecologies, institutional formations, and imaginary regimes, which incorporate racialized, classed, gendered, and sexualized bodies, in order to highlight the convergences and divergences of imperial-capitalist practices. In the second and third part of the chapter, I look at the
conjunction of Bhopal and Katrina. Even as these events are described and articulated as accidents and disasters that happened 20 years apart and in different places, I argue that they are related in their convergences and divergences with imperialism. Their conjunction, I argue, allows us, first, to highlight the reasons why past and present modes of pain, violence, and dying are transformed into future modes of the good life and, second, to also demonstrate how the two sites embody what theorist Giorgio Agamben terms the “inclusive exclusive” of bare life. In other words, the hidden nucleus of sovereign power is a political sphere that itself is divided into “inclusive exclusive”, “nationalinternational” and “state-market” of the world. Agamben’s account is very productive as it brings together the “state of exception,” that is, the decision to suspend the rule of law, with biopolitics “or power exercised through optimizing the life of the governed” rather than “threatening their death” (Chowdhury 2007: 1). However, the Bhopal explosion and Hurricane Katrina are open contestatory moments, I argue, that gesture to ruptures of (neo) colonial and neo-imperial spaces, relations Agamben does not engage with. These events push us to be analytically more nuanced about the temporal and constitutive processes of their formation and their alienations and segregations, the “juridical fold between the national and the international” (Gregory 2006: 9), the intertwinement of ecologies, sovereignties, markets, and the hierarchies predicated on a priori ontological assumptions. In the state of exception, the world and human life already exist and “death is done fabulously” (Neocleous 2005: 88) even when “biopolitics coincides immediately with thanatopolitics” (Agamben 2002: 83; 1998: 122). I then provide a critique of Agamben’s theoretical frame. Following others, I
propose that international politics “is historically embedded in, and internally related to” (Rupert 1995: 32) (neo)-colonial-imperialism (Mbembe 2005; Banerjee 2006). Drawing on Agamben (1998), I argue that the defining of biological life and the production of a specific biopolitical body is the “original” and “ultimate” task of imperial sovereignty, but creates also the conditions of possibility for neocolonial-imperialism, the sovereign state, and the struggles of transformed subdued but not subjected subjectivities. The production of bodies and other ecologies as “disaster” and/or “accident” is not just a logical extension of the state’s power, or other transnational forces but rather foundational subsidies to the logics and practices of such an imperial sovereignty. I focus my argument on three conjectures: (1) state formation and the mark of the law in the global context; (2) the processes of violence that such formations depend on; for example, under what conditions particular bodies become the constitutive material (surplus/subsidies) of the production of imperial-capitalism; and (3) the stakes in a spatial understanding of world politics. I begin with Bhopal and detail the spatial-temporal colonial edifice that draws on segregation, brutal force, geography, regionality, nationality, race, class, caste, bodies, and diegetical subsidies (i.e., how does the Bhopal accident itself become a procreative act for another disaster to occur 20 years later while making invisible the ongoing Bhopali struggles to live on?)3 I then move to lay out the geographical-biopolitical racialized economy of Hurricane Katrina (New
Orleans as “the third world within”) of that “disaster” by drawing on the state and other actors’ discourses and interventions. Finally, I conclude with suggestions about how to substantively engage in direct democratic practices as procreative acts by centralizing the real loss of the source of life: existential formation and production.
