Interview with Jonathan Xavier Inda on Racial Prescriptions

Posted in Articles, Health/Medicine/Genetics, Interviews, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, United States on 2016-09-01 00:40Z by Steven

Interview with Jonathan Xavier Inda on Racial Prescriptions

Theory, Culture & Society
2015-12-22

Sibille Merz, Doctoral Researcher
Goldsmiths, University of London

Questioning Racial Prescriptions: An interview with Jonathan Xavier Inda

Sibille Merz: Racial Prescriptions provides a timely, illuminating and theoretically-engaged analysis of the making of BiDil, the first (and only) drug that was marketed exclusively to African Americans. Even though it has proven commercially unsuccessful, the drug has triggered a remarkable discussion, academic as well as activist, about the increasing geneticisation of race, the nature of racial health disparities in the US, and the re-articulation of racial politics under neoliberalism. What motivated you to write the book?

Jonathan Xavier Inda: One of my main concerns as a scholar has been to explore the exclusionary politics of race in the United States. For example, my first book, Targeting Immigrants: Government, Technology, and Ethics (2006), deals with racial politics of immigration. The major aim of this book is to situate the government of “illegal” immigration within what scholars have called advanced liberal modes of rule. These are forms of governance in which the political apparatus no longer appears obligated to safeguard the well-being of the population through maintaining a sphere of collective security. Instead, it becomes incumbent upon individuals to take upon themselves the primary responsibility for managing their own security and that of their families. Targeting Immigrants notes that while scholars have nicely analysed how advanced liberal governments work through promoting the self-managing capacities of individuals, they have paid scant attention to how such regimes also operate through practices of exclusion…

…Racial Prescriptions continues my examination of the politics of race in the United States. However, instead of dealing with the domain of immigration, it analyses the field of pharmaceutical production and marketing. The book is intended as a contribution to the rethinking of race and biopower in the genomic age. In The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault remarks that biopower designates “what brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and made knowledge-power an agent of transformation of human life” (1980: 143). Biopower thus points to how political and other authorities have assigned themselves the duty of administering bodies and managing collective life. Building on Foucault’s work, scholars such as Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose (2006) have sought to rethink biopower for the 21st century by taking into account developments in the genetic and biological sciences. They suggest that new knowledges of life have fundamentally altered society’s capacity to engineer human vitality. Specifically, the molecularisation of life—that is, the understanding of life at the level of genes and molecules—has led to the envisioning of biological existence as a collection of intelligible vital elements that can be identified, isolated, controlled, mobilised, and reassembled. As such, life is no longer seen as natural or immutable destiny, but envisioned as inherently manipulable and re-formable. From this perspective, biopower today is about controlling and managing human biological processes in order to prevent disease, enhance health, and optimise the quality of individual and collective existence…

Read the entire interview here.

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Racial Prescriptions: Pharmaceuticals, Difference, and the Politics of Life (Race & Difference Colloquium Series)

Posted in Anthropology, Health/Medicine/Genetics, Live Events, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, Social Science, United States on 2016-01-31 01:58Z by Steven

Racial Prescriptions: Pharmaceuticals, Difference, and the Politics of Life (Race & Difference Colloquium Series)

Emory University
Robert W. Woodruff Library, Jones Room
540 Asbury Circle
Atlanta, Georgia 30322
Monday, 2016-02-01, 12:00-13:30 EST (Local Time)

Presented by: James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference

Jonathan Xavier Inda, Chair and Professor of Latino/a Studies
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champagne

In the contemporary United States, matters of life and health have become key political concerns. Important to this politics of life is the desire to overcome racial inequalities in health; from heart disease to diabetes, the populations most afflicted by a range of illnesses are racialized minorities. The solutions generally proposed to the problem of racial health disparities have been social and environmental in nature, but in the wake of the mapping of the human genome, genetic thinking has come to have considerable influence on how such inequalities are problematized. In this Race and Difference Colloquium, Professor Jonathan Xavier Inda (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne) explores the politics of dealing with health inequities through targeting pharmaceuticals at specific racial groups based on the idea that they are genetically different. Drawing on the introduction of BiDil to treat heart failure among African Americans, her contends that while racialized pharmaceuticals are ostensibly about fostering life, they also raise thorny questions concerning the biologization of race, the reproduction of inequality, and the economic exploitation of the racial body.

Engaging the concept of biopower in an examination of race, genetics and pharmaceuticals, Inda’s talk will appeal to sociologists, anthropologists and scholars of science and technology studies with interests in medicine, health, bioscience, inequality and racial politics.

For more information and to RSVP, click here.

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Racial Prescriptions: Pharmaceuticals, Difference, and the Politics of Life

Posted in Books, Health/Medicine/Genetics, Media Archive, Monographs, Politics/Public Policy on 2015-05-10 17:09Z by Steven

Racial Prescriptions: Pharmaceuticals, Difference, and the Politics of Life

Ashgate
September 2014
148 pages
234 x 156 mm
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-4094-4498-5
eBook PDF ISBN: 978-1-4094-4499-2
eBook ePUB ISBN: 978-1-4724-0107-6

Jonathan Xavier Inda, Associate Professor of Latina/Latino Studies
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

In the contemporary United States, matters of life and health have become key political concerns. Important to this politics of life is the desire to overcome racial inequalities in health; from heart disease to diabetes, the populations most afflicted by a range of illnesses are racialized minorities. The solutions generally proposed to the problem of racial health disparities have been social and environmental in nature, but in the wake of the mapping of the human genome, genetic thinking has come to have considerable influence on how such inequalities are problematized. Racial Prescriptions explores the politics of dealing with health inequities through targeting pharmaceuticals at specific racial groups based on the idea that they are genetically different. Drawing on the introduction of BiDil to treat heart failure among African Americans, this book contends that while racialized pharmaceuticals are ostensibly about fostering life, they also raise thorny questions concerning the biologization of race, the reproduction of inequality, and the economic exploitation of the racial body.

Engaging the concept of biopower in an examination of race, genetics and pharmaceuticals, Racial Prescriptions will appeal to sociologists, anthropologists and scholars of science and technology studies with interests in medicine, health, bioscience, inequality and racial politics.

Contents

  • Acknowledgments
  • 1. Racial politics of life
  • 2. The making of BiDil
  • 3. Biosocial citizenship
  • 4. Enlightened geneticization of race
  • 5. Racial vital value
  • 6. Neoliberalization of life
  • Bibliography
  • Index
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