Lee Medovoi | "The Inner Life of Race: Bodies, Souls and the History of Racial Power"

Calling into question accounts of race as a politics of embodiment, this talk approaches race as a biopolitics of populational threat that relies on the dialectic of body and soul. While the body can be seen and marked, the soul signals potentially threatening interiorities: dangerous intentions, beliefs, or desires. This talk argues that race is the power-effect of reading and securing the body in order to police the political threat of inner life. Prof. Medovoi will sketch a genealogy of racial securitization that begins with the medieval inquisition and confession. In early modern Spain, these pastoral technologies of power catalyzed the invention of race as a language for policing the danger of formerly Jewish and Muslim converts. He then considers how this discourse expanded into anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity throughout the colonial world and modern Europe. The talk will weave together the histories of color-line racism, nativism, Islamophobia, antisemitism, and anticommunism into a general account of populational racism, shedding light on the flexible targeting of populations in an era of far-right populism.

Lee Medovoi is a Professor in the Department of English at the University of Arizona and Founding Chair of the Graduate Interdisciplinary Program in Social, Cultural and Critical Theory. He received his Ph.D. program in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University. He is the author of Rebels: Youth and the Cold War Origins of Identity (Duke 2005) and of The Inner Life of Race: Bodies, Souls and the History of Racial Power (Duke 2024). He has published widely on global American studies, biopolitical theory, critical race studies, and the environmental humanities.