Jackie Wang: Carceral Capitalism (2018)

“In this collection of essays, Jackie Wang examines the contemporary incarceration techniques that have emerged since the 1990s. The essays illustrate various aspects of the carceral continuum, including the biopolitics of juvenile delinquency, predatory policing, the political economy of fees and fines, cybernetic governance, and algorithmic policing. Included in this volume is Wang’s influential critique of liberal anti-racist politics, ‘Against Innocence,’ as well as essays on RoboCop, techno-policing, and the aesthetic problem of making invisible forms of power legible.

Wang shows that the new racial capitalism begins with parasitic governance and predatory lending that extends credit only to dispossess later. Predatory lending has a decidedly spatial character and exists in many forms, including subprime mortgage loans, student loans for sham for-profit colleges, car loans, rent-to-own scams, payday loans, and bail bond loans. Parasitic governance, Wang argues, operates through five primary techniques: financial states of exception, automation, extraction and looting, confinement, and gratuitous violence. While these techniques of governance often involve physical confinement and the state-sanctioned execution of black Americans, new carceral modes have blurred the distinction between the inside and outside of prison. As technologies of control are perfected, carcerality tends to bleed into society.”

Publisher Semiotext(e), South Pasadena, CA, 2018
Intervention series, 21
ISBN 9781635900026, 1635900026
359 pages

Interview with author (M. Buna, LA Review of Books, 2018)
Review: Steven Zultanski (Frieze, 2018).

Distributor
WorldCat

PDF

The Global Encyclopaedia of Informality, 2 vols. (2018)

“Alena Ledeneva invites you on a voyage of discovery to explore society’s open secrets, unwritten rules and know-how practices. Broadly defined as ‘ways of getting things done’, these invisible yet powerful informal practices tend to escape articulation in official discourse. They include emotion-driven exchanges of gifts or favours and tributes for services, interest-driven know-how (from informal welfare to informal employment and entrepreneurship), identity-driven practices of solidarity, and power-driven forms of co-optation and control. The paradox, or not, of the invisibility of these informal practices is their ubiquity. Expertly practised by insiders but often hidden from outsiders, informal practices are, as this book shows, deeply rooted all over the world, yet underestimated in policy. Entries from the five continents presented in this volume are samples of the truly global and ever-growing collection, made possible by a remarkable collaboration of over 200 scholars across disciplines and area studies. By mapping the grey zones, blurred boundaries, types of ambivalence and contexts of complexity, this book creates the first Global Map of Informality. The accompanying database (www.in-formality.com) is searchable by region, keyword or type of practice.”

Edited by Alena Ledeneva, with Anna Bailey, Sheelagh Barron, Costanza Curro, and Elizabeth Teague
Fringe series
Publisher UCL Press, London, 2018
Creative Commons BY 4.0 License
ISBN 9781911307907 & 9781787351899
xxix+434 & xxix+538 pages

Publisher, Vol. 2
OAPEN, Vol. 2
WorldCat, Vol. 2

Volume 1: PDF, PDF (10 MB)
Volume 2: PDF (15 MB)
Online resource (wiki)

Elizabeth A. Povinelli: Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism (2016)

“In Geontologies Elizabeth A. Povinelli continues her project of mapping the current conditions of late liberalism by offering a bold retheorization of power. Finding Foucauldian biopolitics unable to adequately reveal contemporary mechanisms of power and governance, Povinelli describes a mode of power she calls geontopower, which operates through the regulation of the distinction between Life and Nonlife and the figures of the Desert, the Animist, and the Virus. Geontologies examines this formation of power from the perspective of Indigenous Australian maneuvers against the settler state. And it probes how our contemporary critical languages—anthropogenic climate change, plasticity, new materialism, antinormativity—often unwittingly transform their struggles against geontopower into a deeper entwinement within it. A woman who became a river, a snakelike entity who spawns the fog, plesiosaurus fossils and vast networks of rock weirs: in asking how these different forms of existence refuse incorporation into the vocabularies of Western theory Povinelli provides a revelatory new way to understand a form of power long self-evident in certain regimes of settler late liberalism but now becoming visible much further beyond.”

Publisher Duke University Press, 2016
ISBN 9780822362111, 0822362112
xii+218 pages

Interview with author: Mathew Coleman and Kathryn Yusoff (Theory, Culture & Society, 2017).

Reviews: Shela Sheikh (Avery Review, 2017), Robin Wright (Society+Space, 2017), Eve Vincent (Australian Aboriginal Studies, 2017), Timothy Neale (Australian Journal of Anthropology, 2017), Andrea Muehlebach (Anthropological Quarterly, 2018), Jean-Thomas Tremblay (Critical Inquiry, 2018), Elizabeth R Johnson, Garnet Kindervater, Zoe Todd, Kathryn Yusoff, Keith Woodward (with author’s response, EPC: Politics and Space, 2019).

Publisher
WorldCat

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