Inner Life of Race

"Leerom Medovoi's The Inner Life of Race engages questions of race, power, and embodiment to analyze how systems of color-line racism are different and similar to other forms of racism, such as Islamophobia or anti-semitism. Working through a Foucauldian frame, Medovoi offers a genealogy of governmentally and security, outlining a parallel between hierarchies of racial embodiment and of what he calls "ensoulment," a system he traces back to fifteenth-century Catholic Spain and the church's attempts to sort out true believers from those who might be passing and thus threats to the whole. He argues that the Church's active concern for true believers directly prefigures the racial-security biopolitics which emerges a few centuries later. This attention to religious concerns enables Medovoi to trace the mutations of religious control to political control and religious fanaticism into political fanaticism, and to analyze how contemporary antisemitism and Islamophobia-as well as homophobia and transphobia-draw on centuries-old anxieties about the particular threats posed by the soul who "passes" as Christian or as a white body"—