E-Books →Disembodiment Corporeal Politics of Radical Refusal

As a work in global critical theory whose normative compass is the suffering body, Disembodiment brings together corporeal enactments of defiance and refusal from the global south with major thinkers of western modernity and prominent critical-theoretical traditions of the twentieth century. Bargu moves from such historical precedents as the suicides of enslaved Africans during the transatlantic crossing, the hunger strikes of woman suffragists in England's prisons, and Gandhian fasting practices in the Indian anticolonial struggle to contemporary examples that include the hunger and thirst strikes in the Maze and Guantánamo, the self-incineration of Mohammed Bouazizi, and the lip-sewing practices of migrants and asylum seekers in detention centers and border zones of the global north today. She takes the reader on an unsettling journey that delineates the emergence of a corporeal repertoire of contention. Performed by the powerless who find themselves in crisis, this repertoire is built on the expressive agency of the body and its ability to irrupt, undoing its training in composure and radicalizing the meaning of dignity.
Disembodiment presents a bold materialist theory of corporeal agency, which upholds the body's powers as fundamentally rebellious and ultimately undomesticatable.