Episode 23: Ensoulment: Lee Medovoi on the Security State and the Inner Life of Race
In episode 23, I speak with Lee Medovoi about his astounding new book, The Inner Life of Race: Souls, Bodies, and The History of Racial Power (Duke UP, 2024). Lee traces the histories of racialization, surveillance, policing, and carcerality from late Medieval Spain, through the development of racial- liberalism and capitalism to the present, asking how these deep histories help us to think of color-line racism, antisemitism, and Islamophobia as operating with similar logics, the logic of security/threat or friend/enemy. After a brief foray into Trump’s deployment of the “snake story” and the role of white womanhood in racist fear mongering, we dive into Lee’s main arguments. We discuss the racialized figure of the “converso,” (forcibly converted Jews) and how mistrust and surveillance of the conversos, and also the “mariscos” (forcibly converted Muslims) in the Iberian Peninsula in the 1400s was connected to the rise of the Ottoman Empire and a prelude to the colonization of the Americas. We unpack Lee’s use of the term “ensoulment” as a way to describe how power projects enmity and threat onto certain populations, justifying increased uses of violent policing and political control, such as we saw in the War or Terror and see now under Trumpian fascism. Finally, we turn to nonviolence and abolitionism as the necessary answer to these entrenched systems that target and deeply harm vulnerable populations and our collective hopes for living-with and belonging together.
Books mentioned and recommended:
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
Joshua Cohen, The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family
To access Lee’s work, go HERE.
Music by Ben Roberts: Benjamin.Roberts447@gmail.com
Comments and ideas to Juliealicecarr@gmail.com
Lee Medovoi
Lee Medovoi is a Professor in the Department of English at the University of Arizona and Founding Chair of the Graduate Interdisciplinary Program in Social, Cultural and Critical Theory. Lee is the author of Rebels: Youth and the Cold War Origins of Identity (Duke 2005) and of The Inner Life of Race: Bodies, Souls and the History of Racial Power (Duke 2024). He has published widely on global American studies, biopolitical theory, critical race studies, and the environmental humanities. He has also co-edited a special issue of the journal Social Text with Keith Feldman (UC Berkeley) on the topic of “Race/Religion/War.”
Between 2013 and 2016 he was the Principal Investigator for a three-year international Mellon Grant that explored the changing vectors of religion and secularism’s imbrications in political life across the globe. This project resulted in a collection co-edited with Elizabeth Bentley titled Religion, Secularism and Political Belonging (Duke, 2021). In 2020, Lee was also the Principal Investigator for a Mellon-funded Sawyer Seminar titled Neoliberalism at the Neopopulist Crossroads that explored the social, economic and cultural underpinnings of the rise of far-right populist movements around the world. In 2021-22, he was a Visiting Scholar at the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. He is currently developing plans for a new book on the environmental unconscious of far-right politics of populist racism. He is also actively involved in the University of Arizona’s Environmental Humanities Consortium.
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