The Suicidal State: Race Suicide, Biopower, and the Sexuality of Population
By Madoka Kishi
Oxford UP, 2024
ISBN: 9780197690079
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-suicidal-state-9780197690079?cc=us&lang=en#
The Suicidal State theorizes a biopolitics of suicide by mapping the entwinement between the Progressive-Era discourse of “race suicide” and period representations of literary suicide. Against the backdrop of the turn-of-the-century debates over immigration restrictions, “race suicide” suggests white Americans' low birth rate as foretelling an immanent extinction of the white race, prefiguring the contemporary white nationalist discourse, “replacement theory.” While race suicide personified the populational subject--the “race”--as a suicidal individual, Progressive-Era literature gave birth to a microgenre of literary suicides, including works by Henry James, Kate Chopin, Jack London, Gertrude Stein, and a series of Madame Butterfly texts.
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The Suicidal State argues that suicides in these texts literalize the fear of race suicide as they thwart the biopolitical demands for self-preservation, survival, and reproduction, articulating queer deathways that betray the nation's reproductive imperative. Both in its figuration of race suicide and in literary suicides, self-inflected death is imagined as a uniquely agential act in its destruction of agency, offering a fertile space for the reconceptualization of biopower's subject formation as it traverses individual and social bodies. That is, the book argues that suicide poses a limit case for the biopolitical management over life. Suicide, as it was imagined at the turn of the century, refuses, nullifies, and parries its obligatory relation to both biopower's discipline of the individual and its management of the population, thereby forging new forms of subjectivity and ways of being in the world that sidestep the twin imperatives for preservation and procreation. In tracking these queer potentialities of suicide, The Suicidal State offers a new history of sex and race, of the relation between individual and collective, of the formation of a biopolitical state that Foucault calls a “racist State, a murderous State, and a suicidal State.”
"Madoka Kishi's new book introduces a truly novel theory of queer biopolitics with an added bonus: the welcome arrival of an incisive intellectual historian. Taking seriously debunked ideologies of 'race suicide'-- and seriously taking them to historical task -- The Suicidal State mixes and mashes up literature, critiques of the state, and difficult questions of agency. With nimble readings of how this derided concept winds its way through fiction by Gertrude Stein, Henry James, and other luminaries, Kishi gifts us an exceptional, frequently startling account of reproduction, racialization, and the promising perils of social 'unbeing.'" -- Scott Herring, Yale University
"Madoka Kishi's remarkable new book reads white-supremacist anxieties about the threat of 'racial suicide'- a trope whose fatal echo shapes contemporary anti-immigrant discourse - against the backdrop of early twentieth-century literary suicides. Brilliantly weaving together American constructions of nationality, race, and gender with the pursuit of reproductive domination by persons of white European descent, The Suicidal State makes a dazzling case for viewing the choice of non-being as a response to the brutal political ontology that posits certain racialized subjects both as socially dead and as harbingers of death for the racial order of power on which American society rests. This is a must-read book for our times." -- Lee Edelman, Tufts University
"The Suicidal State shows us how the state came to long for the erotics of death in the Progressive Era: at the moment when self-murder became suicide and the body politic became the social body, race crossed with sex to deliver and imperil white reproduction. Kishi's arguments are a series of lapidary cuts that expose new desires that glitter with what they cut away, and each chapter presents a revelatory reading of a life canted toward collective death -- New England neurasthenic, Creole flirt, totemic Teuton, and the excretory American. The final turn to ill-fated Butterfly lashes this era to our present, and Kishi's understanding here -- brilliantly limpid and profoundly felt -- demonstrates, in her words, 'how to live on in a suicidal state.'" -- Josephine Park, University of Pennsylvania
Madoka Kishi is a professional in residence in English at Louisiana State University. She has translated Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Touching Feeling (2022), and co-translated Lauren Berlant's Cruel Optimism (2024) and Judith Butler's Parting Ways (2019) into Japanese. She has published essays in the Journal of American Studies, The Henry James Review, and the Journal of Modern Literature.
