Histories of Life: Biopolitical Sovereignty in Precolonial Madagascar

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Black Studies and Archaeology" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Drawing on work by Alexander G. Weheliye and Achille Mbembe this paper considers the ways in which Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben’s notions of biopower and biopolitics have been theorized in relation to Western European modernity and forms of sovereignty over life. What kind of challenge is posed to these genealogies when we consider biopolitics within the frame of precolonial Africa? Turning to highland Madagascar I consider the role of rice in the constitution of sovereignty and the management of life during the 18th and 19th centuries. Here sovereignty was imagined as a divine partnership with rice and ancestors. I make the case that this operated as a form of biopolitics, constituting a human-nonhuman assemblage that demands a rethinking of forms of life and their relationship to the biopolitical.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Black Studies and Archaeology   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2021

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Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology