Join the departments of English and American Studies for a book talk with Professor Leeron Medovoi from the University of Arizona.

Calling into question accounts of race as a politics of embodiment, this talk approaches race instead as a biopolitics of populational threat that relies on a longstanding dialectic of body and soul. While the body can be seen and marked, the soul signals potentially threatening interiorities: dangerous intentions, beliefs or desires. This talk approaches race as the power-effect of reading and securing the body in order to police the political threat of inner life. In this talk Medovoi sketches a genealogy of racial securitization that begins with medieval deployments of inquisition and confession to wage war against heretics, infidels and their threat to the salvation of souls. The talk will weave together the histories of color-line racism, nativism, Islamophobia, antisemitism and anticommunism into a general account of populational racism that sheds light on the flexible targeting of populations we face in an era of strengthening far-right populism.

Lee Medovoi is a professor in the Department of English at the University of Arizona and Founding Chair of the Graduate Interdisciplinary Program in Social, Cultural and Critical Theory. Lee received his Ph.D. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University. He is the author of Rebels: Youth and the Cold War Origins of Identity (Duke 2005) and of The Inner Life of Race: Bodies, Souls and the History of Racial Power (Duke 2024). He has published widely on global American studies, biopolitical theory, critical race studies and the environmental humanities in such journals as Cultural Critique, Minnesota Review, Screen, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Mediations, New Formations, American Literary History and Social Text. He has also co-edited  a special issue of the journal Social Text with Keith Feldman (UC Berkeley) on the topic of “Race/Religion/War.”