Racism as a fundamental dimension of domination: Foucault’s analytics of power from the colonial context
Abstract
Although Foucault's work has influenced postcolonial and decolonial thought, the Frenchman has often been accused of Eurocentrism, renouncing, in some cases, an enriching dialogue between his work and these currents of study. With racism as a specific interest, in this paper, we will first analyze Foucault's Society Must Be Defended and then the contributions of some decolonial thinkers, Frantz Fanon and Achille Mbembe. The consultation of the colonial archive offers possible chronologies about the emergence of state racism that differ from Foucault's and, above all, makes it possible to distinguish how it acts in the different mechanisms of the analytics of power. In this way, we argue that racism can be understood not only as a biopolitical device but also as a fundamental dimension of domination that acts both as a disciplinary technology on the body of the racialized subject and in the power of death of the sovereign.
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