The Biopolitics of Development: Reading Michel Foucault in the Postcolonial Present

208 Pages·2013·2.882 MB·English

by  Sandro Mezzadra, Julian Reid, Ranabir Samaddar (eds.)

Sandro Mezzadra
Julian Reid
Ranabir Samaddar Editors
The Biopolitics
of Development
Reading Michel Foucault
in the Postcolonial Present
The Biopolitics of Development

Sandro Mezzadra (cid:129) Julian Reid

Ranabir Samaddar
Editors
The Biopolitics
of Development
Reading Michel Foucault
in the Postcolonial Present
Editors
Sandro Mezzadra Julian Reid
D epartment of Politics, Institutions and History Professor of International Relations
University of Bologna University of Lapland
Bologna, Italy Lapland, Finland
Ranabir Samaddar
Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group
Kolkata, West Bengal , India
ISBN 978-81-322-1595-0 ISBN 978-81-322-1596-7 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-81-322-1596-7
Springer New Delhi Heidelberg New York Dordrecht London
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Acknowledgements
W e would all like to thank the Finnish Academy for funding the Biopolitics of
Development research project at the University of Lapland, which made possible
the organization of workshops in Kolkata and Bologna, and at which all of the papers
gathered in this volume were presented and developed. We thank the participants
of both of these events for their contributions and encouragement, especially
those of the Calcutta Research Group. We would also like to thank Madhurilata
Basu for her invaluable editorial assistance on the book.
v

Contents
1 Introduction: Reading Foucault in the Postcolonial Present .................. 1
Sandro Mezzadra, Julian Reid, and Ranabir Samaddar
2 Foucault and His ‘Other’: Subjectivation and Displacement .................... 15
Judith Revel
3 Michel Foucault and Our Postcolonial Time ......................................... 25
Ranabir Samaddar
4 Biopolitics and Urban Governmentality in Mumbai ............................ 45
Manish K. Jha, P.K. Shajahan, and Mouleshri Vyas
5 Where Is the Human in Human-Centred Approaches
to Development? A Critique of Amartya Sen’s
‘Development as Freedom’ ....................................................................... 67
David Chandler
6 Beyond Bricks and Mortar: Peace-Building
in a Permanent State of Adaptation ........................................................ 87
Suvi Alt
7 Interrogating the Neoliberal Biopolitics of the Sustainable
Development-Resilience Nexus ................................................................ 107
Julian Reid
8 Lines of Siege: The Contested Government of Nature ......................... 123
Paulo Tavares
9 Politics of Truth and Pious Economies .................................................... 165
Michael Dillon
Bibliography .................................................................................................... 191
vii
Chapter 1
Introduction: Reading Foucault
in the Postcolonial Present
Sandro Mezzadra , Julian Reid , and Ranabir Samaddar
This book emerges from a fundamental discontent that the three of us share with the
politics of Foucault-inspired scholarship. Foucault’s works have had a massive
infl uence on postcolonial literatures, particularly in political theory, literary criticism
and historiography, in recent years, and many of the authors of this book have
themselves made signifi cant contributions to that infl uence. But while Foucault’s
thought has been inspirational for the interrogation of colonial biopolitics, as well
as governmental rationalities concerned with development in the postcolonial era,
his works have too often failed to inspire studies of the forms of political subjectivity
that such regimes of power incite. Instead they have been used to stoke the myth
of the inevitability of the decline of collective political subjects, often describing an
increasingly limited horizon of political possibilities and provoking disenchantment
with the political itself. Worse, they have been the target of a morose criticism for
their apparent inabilities to have addressed spaces outside the Western world
(Chaps. 2 and 3 ). And worse still, they have been used to displace our understanding
and recognition of the brutality and exploitative nature of colonial and every other
form of biopolitics: the war, killing and multiple forms of violence without which it
would not have been possible (Chap. 3 ).
N urturing this discontent with current Foucauldian scholarship, we came up with
the plan for two consecutive symposia, the fi rst in Calcutta in 2010 and the second
in Bologna in 2011, where we would collectively and in collaboration with others
S. Mezzadra (*)
University of Bologna , Bologna , Italy
e-mail: [email protected]
J. Reid
University of Lapland , Lapland , Finland
e-mail: [email protected]
R. Samaddar
Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group , Kolkata , India
e-mail: [email protected]
S. Mezzadra et al. (eds.), The Biopolitics of Development: Reading Michel Foucault 1
in the Postcolonial Present, DOI 10.1007/978-81-322-1596-7_1, © Springer India 2013
2 S. Mezzadra et al.
excavate the importance of Foucault’s work for our capacities to recognize how
this degraded view of political subjectivity came about, particularly within the
framework of the discourses and practices of ‘development’, and with particular
attention to the predicaments of postcolonial peoples. As such, this book, the
outcome of those symposia, is dedicated to exploring how we can use his ideas to
recover the vital capacity to think and act politically in a time when fundamentally
human capacities to think, to know and to act purposively in the world are being
pathologized as expressions of the hubris and ‘underdevelopment’ of postcolonial
peoples. Why and how it is that human life in postcolonial settings has been
depoliticized to such dramatic effect?
The immediacy of these themes ought to be obvious to anyone actually living in
the South. It is not by accident that, as Ranabir Samaddar explains in his individual
contribution to this volume (Chap. 3 ), Foucault’s thought was powerful and infl uential
in India long before it achieved comparable influence and power within much
of Europe. And for those who know and have experienced the governmental and
biopolitical techniques that have long since shaped the exercise of power in India,
this is not surprising. As Manish K. Jha, P. K. Shajahan and Mouleshri Vyas dem-
onstrate in Chap. 4 , concepts of biopolitics and governmentality are immensely
helpful for understanding the manners by which the Indian government and affl uent
Indian elites ensure their security from the Indian urban poor especially. Biopolitical
claims to ‘improve the living condition of the poor’ function paradoxically to
legitimate the demolition of slum settlements, the very spaces of habitat that many
of the Indian urban poor call ‘home’, displacing them for infrastructural develop-
ment projects or other urban renewal programmes that serve the neoliberal economy
(see Chap. 4 ) . An international development apparatus of non-governmental
organizations defi ned by humanitarian goals has proved indispensible for the task
of convincing slum dwellers as to the ‘benefi ts’ of resettlement. In many ways, the
neoliberalization of the Indian state is far in advance of its development in Europe
and other parts of the so-considered Western world. But within the Western acad-
emy, these realities remain heavily under-addressed. I n thinking about what it means
to read Michel Foucault here in the postcolonial present, this book tackles some
signifi cant questions and problems – not simply that of how to explain the ways in
which postcolonial regimes of governance have achieved the debasements of political
subjectivity they have, nor that of how we might better equip them with the means
to suborn postcolonial peoples more fully, but that of how such peoples, in their
subjection to governance, can and do resist, subvert, escape and defy the imposition
of modes of governance that seek to remove them of those very capacities for resis-
tance, subversion, fl ight and defi ance. As Jha, Shajahan and Vyas argue, the squatter
is in many ways an exemplar in this regard; their hard work and ambition in creating
homes out of radically insecure spaces, the love they show for their communities,
their pride in creation and the fortitude demonstrated in their struggles with the
government are lessons to all.
T he question of how to understand the historical and contemporary function
of development doctrine in the propagation and expansion of liberal regimes of
governance is, by now, well rehearsed within critical and postcolonial literatures