The workshop engages with the history of biopolitics in Africa by focusing not on what it was, but what it becomes. Our focus is on how past biopolitical research and projects “live on” in residual materials and infrastructure, somatic and ecological vestiges, but also in enduring social groups and relations, routines, mobilities, narratives and lexicons; and how these biopolitical “traces” act, and are acted with, in/on the present and future. We are attentive to the liveliness of biopolitical remains; their enduring or renewed capacities to transform life and its care, and to be reanimated. Our contributions trace the afterlives of biopolitics including its returns and permutations, and the emergence of new scientific inquiries from old ones, but also the “alterlife,” following Michelle Murphy, that unfolds and surfaces in their traces.
Our 5-day workshop in the Norwegian mountain retreat of Finse brought participants together to discuss pre-circulated papers on the afterlives of biopolitical interventions in Africa. While all papers straddled the gap between past and present, and history and anthropology that the project is constructed across, and narrowed down on particular sites or materials, the emphasis of all contributions was on “life”, that is the continuous liveliness, generativity and mutability of material remains, and on their emerging futures, rather than their historical origins and past meanings.
Workshop theme
Biopolitics in Africa has been in turns violent, minimal, and radical, propelled by colonial experimentality and fantasies of total control, and humanitarian dreams of cheaply averted death, but also by liberatory aspirations to nurture citizenries through public science and evidence-based rule and care. Across variable intensities and ideologies, its active materializations have often been short-lived, enacted as circumscribed campaigns, trials, models, and crisis responses, or enabled by austerity-curtailed surges in public investment. Thus, biopolitics commonly manifest for Africans in its afterwards, as what it bequeathed to bodies, epistemologies, infrastructures and imaginations in the future, taking form as residue, memory, habit, erasure, mutation or template.
Our focus is on how past biopolitical research and projects “live on” in residual materials and infrastructure, somatic and ecological vestiges, but also in enduring social groups and relations, routines, mobilities, narratives and lexicons; and how these biopolitical “traces” act, and are acted with, in/on the present and future. We are attentive to the liveliness of biopolitical remains; their enduring or renewed capacities to transform life and its care, and to be reanimated. Our contributions trace the afterlives of biopolitics including its returns and permutations, and the emergence of new scientific inquiries from old ones, but also the “alterlife,” following Michelle Murphy, that unfolds and surfaces in their traces.