The Biopolitics of Race

Drawing on Michel Foucault’s work and its critical reception and uses, Sokthan Yeng’s book offers a bold and persuasive account of the role that immigration policy and practices have played in the maintenance of the United States of America as a biopolitical state since the late nineteenth century. She deploys a range of philosophers and theorists to test and, generally, vindicate Foucault’s claims about biopolitics, especially his claim that racism here is racism against the abnormal. Focused on different figures of the immigrant, her examinations of the history of immigration policy and practice show how ethnicity, sex and sexuality, religion, and other areas of human difference have been and continue to be racialized in terms of their abnormality. In this, she also offers a helpful contribution to understanding the way that intersections of such identities have been and continue to be used in the qualification of populations inside and outside the nation as normal or abnormal, healthy or pathological. Beyond its presentation of the immigrant as a major focus of problematization in the biopolitics of the United States, the book persuasively casts this as an echo of ancient Greek anxiety about the foreign woman, even if today such worries are extended and addressed through the politically correct discourses of neoliberalism. And in sketching out the ethical implications of its critical and historical work on the biopolitical subjectivities of immigration, the book suggests a valuable philosophical response to the continuing problems of immigration. -- Samuel R. Talcott, University of the Sciences