Short Abstract

Biopolitics in 20th century Africa was variously or simultaneously violent and caring, and often fragmented and short-lived. We discuss the realities and analytic and political purchase of biopolitics at the present point in time, which might mark the end of African biopolitics as we knew it.

Long Abstract

African biopolitics has been in turns violent, minimal, and radical, propelled by colonial experimentality and fantasies of total control, and humanitarian dreams of cheaply averted death, but also by liberatory aspirations to nurture citizenries through public science and evidence-based rule and care. Across variable intensities and ideologies, its active materializations have often been short-lived, enacted as circumscribed campaigns, trials, models, and crisis responses, or enabled by austerity-curtailed surges in public investment. Thus, biopolitics commonly manifest for Africans in its afterwards, as what it bequeathed to bodies, epistemologies, infrastructures and imaginations in the future, taking form as residue, memory, habit, erasure, mutation or template. Yet, because of its incomplete and deferred nature, African biopolitics also retains residual promise – aspirations for improved health care or farming, for protective science and regulation – which may frame citizens’ claims and expectations, motivate state officials’ and foreign aid workers’ projects, or legitimate more or less credibly, national and international policy.

The present moment, however, is marked by a generalized shift towards a politics of disregard for life -- what Achille Mbembe has called the “becoming Black of the world”. In this roundtable, we propose discussing African bio-(and necro-)politics, both in terms of its ambiguity – caring for life while disciplining and differentiating its worth – and its historical situatedness, at a time when we might herald the end of biopolitics, or witness its remobilization as scholarly analytic and political tool.

Propose contribution