An analytics of power from the global south: Achille Mbembe's contributions to a situated genealogy of racism.

Abstract

Abstract: This article is based on the following questions: what power strategies are implemented in the current phase of capitalism in pursuit of the "management" of bodies? Do these strategies assume peculiar characteristics in peripheralised geopolitical contexts? Is it possible that in such spaces the key to peculiarity is found in the conjunction between the notions of power, life-death, and race?

As a first hypothesis, we will argue that this thinker's contributions to critical theory constitute an unavoidable reading key for analyzing the modes of functioning of power over bodies in the contemporary Global South. This is because -we consider- its notion of "necropolitics" allows us to think genealogically not only the forms that the "processes of racialization" took in their emergency (colonial) context, but also the modalities that racism assumes within the current capitalist phase.

Our first objective, then, is to detect - through a brief review of its central texts - both the recurrences and the existing discontinuities between the strategies of construction of "subjects of race" deployed in the period of "modern colonial occupation", and in the "late colonial occupation". A second objective is to answer the question of what bodies have become, today, privileged objects of the "new devices" of identification, classification and racial segregation.

Finally, we will present some of Mbembe's reflections -as well as his relations with the proposals of other thinkers- regarding the practices of resistance and "re-existence" that allow us to rethink politics in the present, in the face of these modes of organization and management of life.