Unclaim this Body: Necropower in the Global Circuit of Anti-Blackness

In this talk, Kris Manjapra traces the invention of the “unclaimed body” within an expanding global circuit of medical practice, carcerality and anti-Blackness from the Age of Abolition to the Jim Crow Era. During this period, the realm of the racialized Dead became a new domain of power and value for liberal empire, with implications for our own times.

A hidden dynamic underlies modern societies with imperialist roots: we do not put some of the Dead to rest; we keep them in bondage. The health and freedom of some rely on the entrapment and exploitation of others, even in death. An imperialist paradigm not only structures the relations among the living, but perpetuates harm committed against colonized and racialized people long after their mortal demise. Our societies still rely, in remarkably persistent ways, on pipelines that shunt racialized bodies into our medical schools, our science labs, and our museums. An imperialist paradigm has generated immortal profits by harvesting value from racialized postmortem people and extracting rent from the derivatives of their bodies.