This book offers an original analysis and theorization of the
biopolitics of development in the postcolonial present, and draws
significantly from the later works of Michel Foucault on
biopolitics. Foucault s works have had a massive influence on
postcolonial literatures, particularly in political science and
international relations, and several authors of this book have
themselves made significant contributions to that influence.
While Foucault s thought has been inspirational for
understanding colonial biopolitics as well as governmental
rationalities concerned with development, his works have too often
failed to inspire studies of political subjectivity. Instead, they
have been used to stoke the myth of the inevitability of the
decline of collective political subjects, often describing an
increasingly limited horizon of political possibilities, and
provoking a disenchantment with the political itself in
postcolonial works and studies.
Working against the grain of current Foucauldian scholarship,
this book underlines the importance of Foucault s work for the
capacity to recognize how this degraded view of political
subjectivity came about, particularly within the framework of the
discourses and politics of development, and with particular
attention to the predicaments of postcolonial peoples. It explores
how we can use Foucault s ideas to recover the vital capacity to
think and act politically at a time when fundamentally human
capacities to think, know and to act purposively in the world are
being pathologized as expressions of the hubris and
underdevelopment of postcolonial peoples. Why and how it is that
life in postcolonial settings has been depoliticized to such
dramatic effect? The immediacy of these themes will be obvious to
anyone living in the South of the world. But within the academy
they remain heavily under-addressed. In thinking about what it
means to read Michel Foucault today, this book tackles some
significant questions and problems: Not simply that of how to
explain the ways in which postcolonial regimes of governance have
achieved the debasements of political subjectivity they have; nor
that of how we might better equip them with the means to suborn the
life of postcolonial peoples more fully; but that of how such
peoples, in their subjection to governance, can and do resist,
subvert, escape and defy the imposition of modes of governance
which seek to remove their lives of those very capacities for
resistance, subversion, flight, and defiance.
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