Coincidentally I’m taking another bodily class right now. It’s a history seminar called Political Technologies of Race and the body. I wouldn’t say that it has been very bawdy however… We mostly discuss how states and corporations deploy material technologies like barbed wire, bombs, and bikinis to produce complacent populations, craft new images of race under the logics of policing and surveillance, and determine who lives and dies. But there is a positive connection between the two! So much of the authors we read in Political Technologies contended with dominant biopolitical forces and stressed the need to imagine new liberatory forms of living. The learning I took in came from the work of Black, Indigenous and trans scholars who have a keen sense of how the manipulations and refashioning of their bodies makes the world go round.
I think that the Rabelaisian world of giants and prodigality along with Bakhtin’s analytical lens offers another useful tool to dig deep into the hellscape we live in today. I was fascinated by how much of a guide into early modern peasant culture Rabelais’ works are. These kinds of sources are valuable to historical work which I will be doing more of. At a time when so much of the repressive forces around the world stem from European colonization, economics and cultural hegemony, Rabelais offers a window on a different kind of West Europe. Carnival is not a utopia but it is an alternative form of society to what began forming in the 16th century. It’s important to remember that European ascendancy was not inevitable, as much as they have liked to frame it that way. Rabelais and Bakhtin remind us of what could have been and what still could be. One of the most celebrated traditions across the Caribbean and South America–the sites of the worsts of imperialism and colonialism–is after all Carnival. Somehow this cultural legacy has persisted and I’m grateful to the class for helping bring that out. With an emphasis on shared community of bodies, degradation of the sacred, and generative recycling, the grotesque and carnivalesque seem to counter the power of political technologies. I look forward to incorporating them in the future!
Also I’m excited to look back on all the great appetizer posts and reading diaries to check out the interesting information and ideas everyone has brought. This website is wonderful bank of knowledge.