Disembodiment: Corporeal Politics of Radical Refusal by Banu Bargu ISBN 9780197608562, 9780197608531, 0197608566, 0197608531 instant download

Disembodiment: Corporeal Politics of Radical Refusal by Banu Bargu ISBN 9780197608562, 9780197608531, 0197608566, 0197608531 instant download

Disembodiment examines self-destruction, self-injury, and radical self-endangerment as unconventional performances of refusal that are erased, marginalized, and distorted by metanarratives of history as progress and agency as freedom. From the death acts of enslaved Africans, hunger strikes of woman suffragists, and Gandhian fasting practices to the self-incineration of Bouazizi, hunger and thirst strikes in the Maze and Guantánamo, and lip-sewing practices of migrants and asylum seekers at the borders of the Global North today, Bargu traces a bleak repertoire of contention performed by the oppressed. As a work in global critical theory whose normative compass is the suffering body, Disembodiment brings together corporeal enactments of defiance from the Global South with major thinkers of Western modernity and prominent critical-theoretical traditions of the twentieth century. Disembodiment offers a materialist theory of corporeal agency that unfolds a stark critique of the present and upholds the body’s powers as fundamentally rebellious and undomesticable.

Banu Bargu is Professor in History of Consciousness at University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research and publications are situated at the intersection of political and critical theory, anthropology, history of social movements and resistance practices, and Middle East politics. She is the author of Starve and Immolate: The Politics of Human Weapons, which received the First Book Award given by the Foundations of Political Theory section of the American Political Science Association and was named an Outstanding Academic Title by Choice. She is the incoming co-editor of Political Theory, the flagship journal of the field.