What's Love Got to Do with It? The Race of Freedom and the Drag of Descent

Abstract

Intimate VoyagesAs long as there was race, there was the savage. Tribes would come later as those who invented their descending lines and segmentable surfaces projected them into the classical past of gens and phatries. And as long as there were savages, there were infidels. Christianity, defeated in the old Jerusalem, established a New Jerusalem through conquest and settlement, conversion and genocide, enslavement and rectitude in the Americas and Pacific. Some savages would be bestowed with cultures and some religions with the power of enlightenment. And yet, in the shadow of the enlightenment project, all of these social figures and social histories seem to collapse into a unilinear process of historical descent-the Crusades begat voyages of discovery, which begat the problem of the twentieth century, namely, the color line and the international division of colonizer and colonizer, the North and the South, the East and the West, the politics of recognition and the refusals of secularism-and a univocal problem of race, racialization, and racism. Race seems to have begat race: what makes discourse of tribalism, racism, and the savage slot seem 'the same' and seem different than the national citizen/subject is that they are all the effect of the same razza (lineage). Their actual social divergences and specificities are bled out. "But he who listens to history finds that things have no pre-existing essence, or an essence fabricated piecemeal from alien forms" (Foucualt 1984: 78).This brief essay suggests another way of understanding what constitutes these social figures and social histories into one constellation. I suggest how discourses of individual freedom and social constraint-what I call autological and genealogical imaginaries-animate and articulate the razza of savagery, tribalism, race, color, and colonialism. In this way, autology and genealogy provide the diagram and logic that collapse all the razza of race, with the result that everyone appears

Labors of Love: On the Political Economies and Ethics of Bovine Politics in Himalayan India

“…While older gau-rakshaks preferred the labor of mediated seva to vigilante violence, they, too, understood their work as a form of inherently masculine labor directed toward securing the nation (inseparable from Gau-Mata) from those incapable of truly loving it. True prem, in both these cases, was understood as transcendental, unmoored from the constraints of an "enfleshed" world and directed toward an abstract object of devotion (Povinelli 2005). It was also beyond doubt or reproach in a way that did not allow for any reflection on the extreme inequality, exclusion, and violence that buttressed it.…”

“…This semantic openness was precisely what Mohini chachi was wrestling with as she reflected on the intensity of the affective bond she shared with her cows as well as its ethical limits. It was the embodied, intersubjective labor involved in raising cows that created her "thickly enfleshed" attachments to them, attachments she understood as moh or love (Povinelli 2005; cf. Jalais 2009; Govindrajan 2018).…”

Love and the stranger: Intimate relationships between Aboriginal and non‐Aboriginal people in a very remote Aboriginal town, northern Australia

“…A sentimental analysis might see their relationship as an example of what Povinelli (: 45) described as a kind of modern love which ‘exfoliates the social skin, what produces racial difference as if it were simply a skin that can be peeled away, leaving behind the true self’. Yet even Andrew was not naive to the reality that the kind of ideological exfoliation referred to by Povinelli was utopian, and that ‘at times, stress can reduce people's perception of you to a racial stereotype’.…”

Necrointimacies: Affect and The Virtual Reverberations of Violent Intimacy

“…As a form of intimate alignment, resonance points to the proximity to "a set of normative ideals and aspirations…tied to capital and corporeal" (McGlotten 2013, 59) achievement. The link between intimacy and the social distributions of life and death has also been explored by Elizabeth Povinelli (2005) and Lisa Lowe (2015). Povinelli argues that the "imaginary of the intimate event is always disrupted and secured by the logic of [racial] exception" (2005, 173-175), while Lowe adds that this allows for the emergence of "modern liberal subjects and modern spheres of social life" (2015,18).…”