From the “Bio” to the “Necro”: The Human at the Border

This chapter puts biopolitics in conversation with decolonial theory in order to investigate the disavowed colonial history of necropolitics at the center of modernity’s continuous racialization of “Man.” It further develops Achille Mbembe’s influential notion of necropolitics by tracing its origins to the colonial principle of power: ‘make die let die,’ and by understanding this new technology of power as the de-humanization device by which the human is divided across color lines. Such de-humanization, the chapter concludes, is prominent in the global production of unauthorized immigrants as disposable people through the necropolitical dispositif of the border. This technology of power makes the lives of people of color more vulnerable to death, their deaths more vulnerable to symbolic invisibility, and the material and symbolic intensification of such death multiplied in the fabrication of death-worlds in their territories of origin in the global south