Grounding Biopower: Inventions of Land and Landscape
Type: Call for Papers
Date: December 1, 2016
Location: Switzerland
Subject Fields: Architecture
and Architectural History, Art, Art History & Visual Studies, Race
Studies, Rural History / Studies, World History / Studies
Workshop: June 2-3, 2017 at University of Basel, Urban Studies
In
his early lectures on biopolitics, Michel Foucault described a crucial
shift occurring in eighteenth-century Europe as population came to
displace territory as the primary object of sovereignty. Assuming this
account to be true, the question arises: What exactly happened to
territory? Did it become simply a container for population, or perhaps
an instrument of its governance? Or did it become something different
altogether, displaced yet again by new techniques of land-management,
colonization, warfare, and financial speculation?
This workshop proposes that, with the rise of biopower, territory increasingly became translated into land, the
latter emerging as a necessary technological and ideological
correlative to population. New conceptions of land management,
ownership, and improvement, along with the intensification of
agriculture and resource extraction (often in contexts of colonization
or nation-building) were complicit with ways of organizing population
into categories of race, class, nationality, and gender. Ancient notions
of territorial stewardship as a source of political rights
metamorphosed during the eighteenth through twentieth centuries into
analogous conceptions of land ownership and improvement (or, in some
cases, land collectivization) as a source of both citizenship and
capital. Land became the figure-ground against which a population could
be represented as a nation, and, conversely, against which people
without an officially recognized claim to land could be excluded from
nationality or from economic rights. But this development required a
host of new cultural, epistemic, and technological approaches to land
management and representation.
This workshop asks participants to
consider how land might resemble or differ from territory in its uses
and organization, and how this relates to the rise of biopolitics. How
has the governance of population assigned new ideological and material
functions to land, whether through methods of representation and
calculation, through agricultural and extractive technologies, through
physical and communicative infrastructures, or through new cultural,
legal, and social structures? Given how ancestral connections to land
are often construed as a fundamental criterion in distinguishing
citizens from non-citizens and indigenes from non-indigenes, we ask
participants to address how relationships between land and population
are developed and promulgated. How have new constructions of land
vis-à-vis population altered the way that territory is understood and
regulated?
We invite paper proposals focused on the eighteenth
through twenty-first centuries, and are especially interested in the
aesthetics and semiotics of landscape, cartography, architecture,
infrastructures, and urban planning, although we welcome a range of
disciplinary approaches. Rather than presenting formal papers,
participants will be asked to circulate a paper in advance and then give
an informal 10-15 minute talk at the workshop, to be followed by
discussions.
Please submit a 300- to 400-word abstract by December 1, 2016 to Ginger Nolan and Prof. Kenny Cupers at: groundingbiopower@gmail.com
The
workshop is organized by the Urban Studies program in the Department of
Social Science, University of Basel, and is sponsored by the
Professorship in History and Theory of Architecture and Urbanism under
Professor Kenny Cupers.
Contact Email: virginia.nolan@unibas.ch