The Suicidal State
Race Suicide, Biopower, and the Sexuality of Population
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Product details:
- Publisher OUP USA
- Date of Publication 3 February 2025
- ISBN 9780197690079
- Binding Hardback
- No. of pages260 pages
- Size 238x164x27 mm
- Weight 503 g
- Language English 568
Categories
Short description:
Through mapping the entwinement between the turn-of-the-century nativist discourse, “race suicide,” and the frequent representation of suicide in Progressive-Era literature, The Suicidal State asks what kind of agency, subjectivity, and intimacies suicide could forge in its undoing of the selfhood. Prefiguring the twenty-first-century white nationalist discourse “replacement theory,” race suicide imagined the white race's declining birthrate as a sign of its imminent extinction, sparking anti-immigrant sentiment and legislation. Suicidal figures in period literature, this book argues, symptomatically enact race suicide to short-circuit the imperatives of racial reproduction and self-preservation, instead gesturing toward new erotic relationalities and pleasures.
MoreLong description:
The Suicidal State theorizes a biopolitics of suicide by mapping the entwinement between the Progressive-Era discourse of “race suicide” and period representations of literary suicide. Against the backdrop of the turn-of-the-century debates over immigration restrictions, “race suicide” suggests white Americans' low birth rate as foretelling an immanent extinction of the white race, prefiguring the contemporary white nationalist discourse, “replacement theory.” While race suicide personified the populational subject--the “race”--as a suicidal individual, Progressive-Era literature gave birth to a microgenre of literary suicides, including works by Henry James, Kate Chopin, Jack London, Gertrude Stein, and a series of Madame Butterfly texts.
The Suicidal State argues that suicides in these texts literalize the fear of race suicide as they thwart the biopolitical demands for self-preservation, survival, and reproduction, articulating queer deathways that betray the nation's reproductive imperative. Both in its figuration of race suicide and in literary suicides, self-inflected death is imagined as a uniquely agential act in its destruction of agency, offering a fertile space for the reconceptualization of biopower's subject formation as it traverses individual and social bodies. That is, the book argues that suicide poses a limit case for the biopolitical management over life. Suicide, as it was imagined at the turn of the century, refuses, nullifies, and parries its obligatory relation to both biopower's discipline of the individual and its management of the population, thereby forging new forms of subjectivity and ways of being in the world that sidestep the twin imperatives for preservation and procreation. In tracking these queer potentialities of suicide, The Suicidal State offers a new history of sex and race, of the relation between individual and collective, of the formation of a biopolitical state that Foucault calls a “racist State, a murderous State, and a suicidal State.”
Madoka Kishi's new book introduces a truly novel theory of queer biopolitics with an added bonus: the welcome arrival of an incisive intellectual historian. Taking seriously debunked ideologies of 'race suicide'- and seriously taking them to historical task - The Suicidal State mixes and mashes up literature, critiques of the state, and difficult questions of agency. With nimble readings of how this derided concept winds its way through fiction by Gertrude Stein, Henry James, and other luminaries, Kishi gifts us an exceptional, frequently startling account of reproduction, racialization, and the promising perils of social 'unbeing.'
Table of Contents:
Introduction
1. Sacrificial Ecstasy: The Bostonians, Neurasthenia, and the “Obscure Hurt”
2. Flirting with Death: The Awakening's Liberal Economy and the Consuming Desire of New Women
3. The Spectral Lineage: Jack London, Teutonism, and Interspecies Kinship
4. Gertrude Stein's Melting Pot: Jewishness and the Excretory Pleasure of The Making of Americans
Coda: Hindsight 20/20, or Asiatic Im-personality
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
