Overview

In The Inner Life of Race, Leerom Medovoi turns away from conventional views of race as a politics of the phenotypical body to theorize race instead as a politics of populational threat. Racism’s genealogy, argues Medovoi, invokes longstanding theological distinctions between the body and the soul. While the body can be seen and marked, the soul signals potentially threatening interiorities: dangerous intentions, beliefs, or desires. Race is the power-effect of reading the body in order to police the political threat of the soul. Medovoi’s genealogy begins with medieval deployments of inquisition and confession to wage war against heretics, infidels, and their threat to the salvation of souls. In early modern Spain, these pastoral technologies of power catalyzed the invention of race as a language for the danger of formerly Jewish and Muslim converts. Medovoi shows how this discourse expanded into anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity throughout the colonial world and modern Europe, laying the foundation for racialized capitalism and liberal governmentality. Medovoi weaves histories of color-line racism, nativism, Islamophobia, antisemitism, and anticommunism into a pathbreaking account of the political work populational racism accomplishes.

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9781478030805

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Reviews

“The Inner Life of Race is a riveting and utterly compelling account of ‘religion’ and later ‘race’ as technologies for mapping and managing the relations between body and soul and between individuals and collectives. Rarely have I read a book whose originality of argument and enviable clarity of expression pulled me through with such momentum, excitement, and head-shaking moments of ‘wow’. This book will make tremendous contributions to a wide range of disciplines and conversations and will be eagerly taken up, discussed, debated, and taught.” -- Ann Pellegrini, coauthor of * Gender without Identity * “Many of us have been waiting for precisely a book of this kind, one that can help us to make sense of Islamophobia in terms of histories of racial discourse and that can help explain the specific affinities of racism and war in our own period. Indeed, Leerom Medovoi offers much more than this, as he suggests a sweeping reconceptualization of racial ordering.” -- Nikhil Pal Singh, author of * Race and America’s Long War *

“The Inner Life of Race is a riveting and utterly compelling account of ‘religion’ and, later, ‘race’ as technologies for mapping and managing the relations between body and soul and between individuals and collectives. Rarely have I read a book whose originality of argument and enviable clarity of expression pulled me through with such momentum, excitement, and head-shaking 'Wow' moments. This book will make tremendous contributions to a wide range of disciplines and conversations and will be eagerly taken up, discussed, debated, and taught.” -- Ann Pellegrini, coauthor of * Gender without Identity * “Many of us have been waiting for precisely a book of this kind, one that can help us to make sense of Islamophobia in terms of histories of racial discourse and that can help explain the specific affinities of racism and war in our own period. Indeed, Leerom Medovoi offers much more than this, as he suggests a sweeping reconceptualization of racial ordering.” -- Nikhil Pal Singh, author of * Race and America’s Long War *

Author Information

Leerom Medovoi is Professor of English and Social, Cultural, and Critical Theory at the University of Arizona, the author of Rebels: Youth and the Cold War Origins of Identity, and the coeditor of Religion, Secularism, and Political Belonging, both also published by Duke University Press.

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