Spectra 

Abstract: This article applies discussions of biopolitics and rationalities by governments to “make live” and “let die” as a heuristic for the speculative sorting of bodies and their antibodies as the United States and individual states lurch toward post-COVID life. It considers how governments rationalize the elimination of certain populations in the name of improving the vitality of the dominant group. Sociologist Michel Foucault, who popularized the idea among academics in the late 1970s, called biopolitics the application of “life-producing techniques.” Biopolitics operates under the prerogative of whom to “make live” and whom to “let die.” Its applications in the last century have rationalized the elimination of perceived outgroups to improve the vitality of the nation-state. This article theorizes that the prerogative to “make live” and “let die” functions as a tacit rationale for negotiating pandemic life. As a cultural agent, COVID has brought into stark relief the burdens of suffering that U.S. society places on marginalized communities, particularly African Americans and Latinx populations; as well as incarcerated and otherwise detained individuals left exposed to virus spread.

Abstract: The Commons is celebrated for its role in linking anti-capitalist struggles across the world, as demonstrated by the myriad local and regional attempts to reclaim shared access and decision-making over collective resources, spaces, and knowledge. However, despite its success as a rallying point for diverse initiatives, the Commons faces critique from within the anti-capitalist Left. First, there is evidence that Commons initiatives are vulnerable to cooptation by capitalism's pervasive political forms and do not impede its continued expansion. Second, there is doubt as to whether the radical political principles and practices embraced by Commons movements, including open-endedness, pluriversality, and prefigurative politics are sufficient for spurring system change. Despite the soundness of these critiques, this paper argues that it is both possible and worthwhile to defend the Commons as one of many strategies for moving beyond capitalism. Doing so necessitates distinguishing between transformational and non-transformational variants of the Commons. The paper will delineate and contrast two ideal-typical variants of Commons approaches, thereby responding to critiques and emphasizing the Commons' potential. The first variant, a "politics of the commons," includes initiatives that bring people together to build collective forms for sharing resources, spaces, and knowledge, in response to situational threats to survival or well-being. This non-transformational variant faces temporal and geographical limitations and is vulnerable to cooptation because it does not confront structural, long- term, and systemic causes of enclosure and expropriation. In contrast, in the second variant, "commoning the political," what is held in common is the anti-capitalist political processes itself. This second approach goes beyond traditional state-based, Euro-centric, or universalistic Leftist models to allow for a pluriversal and long-term transformation by combining radical political processes with antagonistic strategies for confronting capitalist domination.

Abstract: Colonial legal historiography takes various forms. Here I concentrate on a less common lens to examine juridical relationships between colonial subjects and their respective normative structures (or, in this case, empire). In this paper, I examine the ubiquitous struggle for and against agency that occurs in non-linear processes of (re)imagining legal codes to show how subjects are situated in relation to various juridical constructs. I argue that this battle over individual or collective agentic status is a result of law’s ability to create and to stratify (or, graph) the degree of “personhood” ceded to subjects. This capacity of law can prima facie be seen as impacting two aims of empire, the need to adjudicate difference (and thus define/limit colonial personhood – the local agenda) and the desire to extend imperial influence (the universal agenda). Concentrating on the former, I conclude that the effort to concretize subjective difference in these spaces can be seen as a strategic objective to normalize the space governed. This then necessitates correlative tactical responses by subjects. 1