ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I try to sketch the nature of the economy of what I call contemporary colonial power. I investigate how this power is exercised through twin tropes of discipline and aesthetic representation. I argue that the economy of contemporary colonial power can be traced to its intimate effects on bodies placed in what may, with some qualification, be called spaces of exception. The chapter begins with a brief analysis of the structure of colonial power
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I suggest that this power was centered on discourses of normalization that discipline bodies and render them governable subjects. The next section develops the idea of the body as the exemplary site for the coming into formation of political forces, making structures of power visible. I then move on to account for the structure of colonial power in contemporary times, locating it genealogically to eighteenth-and nineteenth-century colonialism, before investigating the exercise of colonial power in common ways in two ostensibly distinct spaces: Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and Semenyih immigration detention camp in Malaysia. I undertake to explain colonial power as a process of ordering space and its inhabitants and temporality. I suggest that the nature of colonial power may be understood best in how it becomes fleshed out on the bodies of those most marginal. Thus, I am attempting to account for a form of power that is both general (in its operative spacing procedures) and specific (in the particularities of its impacts on different types of marginalized people in different spaces).
