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Blackness and Biopower: Unveiling the Tactics of Biopolitics in Select Afro-American Poetry

. Abhijith T S Research Scholar, Department of English, St Berchmans College(Autonomous), Changanassery, Kerala, India


Abstract

The paper entitled “Blackness and Biopower: Unveiling the Tactics of Biopolitics in Select Afro-American Poetry” is an attempt to explore the ideological underpinnings of biopower acting on the black body with reference to selected poems of Afro-American literature. The Afro-Americans had an anxiety to embody or represent authentic black identity. History provides amble testimony to prove the regulation of the Afro-Americans through an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of their bodies and exerting control over them. This praxis of biopower is a tactics to politicise the black body. Foucault talks about the exercise of sovereign power over the biological life of man and the creation of a biopolitical body. Thus, the exercise of power transforms a territorial state into a state of population. According to Agamben, it is the basic separation of “bare life”; the form of existence reduced to biological functions. Afro-American poetry is an artefact of slavery and racial discrimination and the black poets are not free to choose any theme as long as their experience in the United States compels them to pay tribute to the power of oppression. Therefore the selected poems offer the key which exposes the ways by which power penetrates the subjects’ very bodies and forms of life. The paper, thus, tries to unveil the tactics of biopolitics that subjugated the Afro-Americans in the vortex of blackness.

Key Words: blackness, biopolitics, Afro-Americans, identity, body, language…

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