Jonathan Xavier Inda

In the contemporary United States, matters of life and health have become key political concerns. Important to this politics of life is the desire to overcome racial inequalities in health; from heart disease to diabetes, the populations most afflicted by a range of illnesses are racialized minorities. The solutions generally proposed to the problem of racial health disparities have been social and environmental in nature, but in the wake of the mapping of the human genome, genetic thinking has come to have considerable influence on how such inequalities are problematized. Racial Prescriptions explores the politics of dealing with health inequities through targeting pharmaceuticals at specific racial groups based on the idea that they are genetically different. Drawing on the introduction of BiDil to treat heart failure among African Americans, this book contends that while racialized pharmaceuticals are ostensibly about fostering life, they also raise thorny questions concerning the biologization of race, the reproduction of inequality, and the economic exploitation of the racial body.

Engaging the concept of biopower in an examination of race, genetics and pharmaceuticals, Racial Prescriptions will appeal to sociologists, anthropologists and scholars of science and technology studies with interests in medicine, health, bioscience, inequality and racial politics.

Governmentality, Immigration, illegality. This book frames the study of immigration within the Michel Foucault inspired theories of governmentality. Specifically, it focuses on the government of migrant illegality. It is concerned, on the one hand, with the kinds of knowledge, the specific problematizations, and the various authorities that have constructed “illegal” immigrants as targets of government; and, on the other, with the specific tactics, techniques, and programs that have been deployed to manage this population. The book, in short, is concerned with how “illegal” immigrants have been problematized as objects of knowledge and governmental intervention.

In the United States, immigration is generally seen as a law and order issue. Amidst increasing anti-immigrant sentiment, unauthorized migrants have been cast as lawbreakers. Governing Immigration Through Crime offers a comprehensive and accessible introduction to the use of crime and punishment to manage undocumented immigrants.

Presenting key readings and cutting-edge scholarship, this volume examines a range of contemporary criminalizing practices: restrictive immigration laws, enhanced border policing, workplace audits, detention and deportation, and increased policing of immigration at the state and local level. Of equal importance, the readings highlight how migrants have managed to actively resist these punitive practices. In bringing together critical theorists of immigration to understand how the current political landscape propagates the view of the "illegal alien" as a threat to social order, this text encourages students and general readers alike to think seriously about the place of undocumented immigrants in American society.

This volume provides a critical perspective on the meaning and significance of modernity – one of the more significant areas of anthropological inquiry. The purposes of the book are especially (1) to introduce students and scholars to the growing and exciting body of anthropological literature on modernity; (2) to introduce readers to Foucauldian inspired anthropologies, thus demonstrating the pertinence of Foucault for contemporary anthropological study; and (3) to highlight the importance of ethnographic approaches for Foucauldian scholarship and for the study of modernity.

The Anthropology of Globalization provides an ethnographic introduction to the world of flows and interconnections. It is concerned with tracking the paths taken by the various cultural flows that crisscross the globe, as well as with exploring the experiences of people as more of their everyday lives become contingent on globally extensive social relations. The volume, in other words, simultaneously focuses on the large-scale processes through which the globe is becoming increasingly interconnected and on the ways people around the world – from African and Asia to the Caribbean and North America – mediate these processes in culturally specific ways. The Anthropology of Globalization is concerned, in short, with highlighting the conjunctural and situated character of globalization.

This article focuses on detention care and its deadly consequences in the United States. Between October 2003 and October 2019, there were at least 196 deaths in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody, many the result of grossly inadequate medical practices. Drawing on the case of Juan Carlos Baires, who was denied antiretroviral medication, the essay argues that, rather than being beneficiaries of care, noncitizens in detention are often victims of uncare—of a dearth or absence of both affective (concern about) and practical (providing for) care. The consequence of this uncare is that migrant lives are imperiled to the point of death.

In Racial Prescriptions, Jonathan Xavier Inda offers a critical and timely analysis of the making of BiDil, the first (and only) drug that was marketed exclusively to African Americans. Sibille Merz speaks to him about the re-articulation of racial politics under neoliberalism, the legacies of scientific racism and the molecularization of biopolitics in the genomic age.

This essay examines the contemporary politics of race and pharmaceuticals, with a focus on BiDil, a heart failure medication approved by the Food and Drug Administration solely for blacks. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s work on biopower, the essay suggests that pharmaceuticals such as BiDil are implicated in what could be called a racial politics of life. This is a politics that takes as its object the biological vitality of the racial body. The essay pays attention both to the life-affirming aspects of this racial politics of life and to its exclusionary underside.

The targeting of criminal offenders for removal has become one of the central priorities of contemporary immigration enforcement in the USA. Scholars have rightly highlighted the importance of a series of laws passed during the 1990s, in particular the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Criminal Responsibility Act, in laying the foundations for this targeting of immigrants. These laws increased the penalties for breaching US immigration laws and expanded the class of non-citizens who could be deported for committing crimes. In this article, I draw attention to an earlier immigration law that has played a key, but less studied, role in laying the groundwork for the contemporary policing and removal of immigrants: the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA). IRCA is well-known for having criminalized the hiring of undocumented workers, increasing the resources of the Immigration and Naturalization Service to patrol the nation’s borders, and providing undocumented immigrants with a path toward legalization. But the law also contained a small provision that required the US Attorney General to deport non-citizens convicted of removable offenses as expeditiously as possible. This provision dealing with the removal of ‘criminal aliens’ has turned out to be of monumental significance. In many ways, it has helped to dramatically shape the nature of contemporary immigration enforcement. IRCA basically helped set in motion the contemporary practice of targeting ‘criminal aliens’ for deportation. In turn, this practice has morphed into a mechanism for policing immigrant ‘illegality’ more generally.

In this article, the authors explore, through the notions of cultural citizenship, how newly arrived immigrant students in California seek to carve out social space. They argue that students in Santa Ana, California, both embrace and challenge the prevailing ideologies on language embedded in Proposition 227, the so-called "English for the Children" initiative. Students here are at least moderately successful in exploiting the "translocality " of cities like Santa Ana to become polyglot citizens in America.

This article explores border policing as a way of governing illegal immi- gration. In particular, it focuses on the technical dimensions of this process— on border policing as a technology. Not just as any technology, however, but as a prophylactic one. Border policing is a prophylactic technology in the sense that it brings together an array of practical and intellectual mechanisms in an effort to affect the conduct of illegal immigrants in such as way as to forestall illicit border crossings. The goal here is social prophylaxis. It is to prevent undocumented immigrants from becoming ‘problems’ in the social body through preventing their entry into the US.

Over the past few decades, health-based claims and matters of life have become central to the citizenship politics of the United States. Indeed, individuals a=icted with a wide range of maladies—from AIDS and mental illness to chronic fatigue syndrome and muscular dystrophy—have taken action and sought to be recognized by political, medical, and other authorities in terms of their vital rights as citizens. In this context, undocumented immigrants too, despite their legal status and the intense immigration enforcement climate in the United States, have turned to their biology to make citizenship claims. This essay focuses speciFcally on the efforts of 14 young undocumented migrants to obtain spots on the transplant waitlists in Chicago-area hospitals. It examines their activism in terms of biosociality, a form of citizenship in which individuals and groups are “made up” and come together around a shared biological state or identiFcation—a speciFc disease, corporeal vulnerability, genetic risk, embodied harm, somatic suffering, and so forth— in order to gain recognition, resources, and care. Biosociality thus amounts to collectivities mobilizing on the basis of their damaged or precarious biology as a way of securing vital rights—the right to life, health, and healing. In the case at hand, undocumented immigrants have been “made up” and have come together around organ failure and the general suffering of the “illegal” migrant body, the goal being to achieve access to new organs. Migrant biosociality is about collective entitlement to health services, hope for better treatment, and helping suffering bodies. It is grounded in the belief that undocumented immigrants deserve access to life-saving medical technologies.

This chapter focuses on how the political right in the United States, particularly in California, has propagated a highly charged political rhetoric in which Third World migrants, Mexicans in particular, are deemed to present a threat to the welfare of the nation. This sort of rhetoric has given rise to and legitimated numerous efforts to exclude the immigrant from the body politic. One way to interpret these practices of exclusion is in terms of what Michel Foucault called biopower. This term describes the operating logic of modern forms of government, whose main concern is the welfare of the population, the improvement of its condition, the increase of its wealth, longevity, health, etc. There is an underside to biopower however, since it is often the case that entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity. Thus the counterpart of the power to secure an individual’s continued existence is the power to expose an entire population to death. Using the Foucauldian notion of biopower, this paper explores how the state, in order to fortify the health of the population, aims to eliminate those influences that are deemed harmful to the biological growth of the nation. It thus shows how the exclusion of the immigrant is codified as an essential and noble pursuit necessary to ensure the survival of the social body.

This chapter explores that role that racial minority communities in the United States have played in advocating for race-based medicine. Specifically, it looks at African-Americans as central players in the making of BiDil, a heart failure drug approved by the FDA for only self-identified blacks. I suggest that while BiDil might be involved in the biologization of race, African American advocacy for the drug cannot be grasped as a return to racial science: race is not invoked in order to set up hierarchies of difference nor to legitimate the subordination of blacks. Rather, the contemporary appeal of race in medicine for African Americans is better understood in terms of biological citizenship. Generally speaking, biological citizenship refers to the linking of rights and citizenship to matters of health, disease, and bodily suffering. It thus includes any citizenship project in which ideas of citizenship are tied to beliefs about the corporeal, biological life of human beings. Such citizenship projects have become an important part of the political landscape in the West, with individuals and communities increasingly defining what it means to be a citizen in terms of their vital rights – their rights to life, health, and healing. African American support for BiDil is precisely about vital rights. It is about entitlement to health services, hope for better treatment, and helping suffering bodies. It is grounded in the belief that the African American community, which has historically been excluded from the benefits of biomedicine, deserves access to life saving medications. Pivotal here is thus not the biologization of race, but the idea that medications targeted to African Americans are essential to materializing the hope of finding cures and achieving healthy bodies.

Web-based case study of Moises Tino Lopez, a 23-year-old native of Guatemala who was being held in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facility pending his removal from the United States. He suffered several seizures while in detention, the last two taking place in solitary confinement. Instead of taking him to a hospital so that he could receive proper care, jail and medical staff basically let him die.

Web-based case study of Anastasio Hernández Rojas. Border enforcement agents beat and tasered him to death as they were deporting him to Mexico. Despite video and bodily evidence (the trauma of the beating was visible all over Anastasio’s body), the United States Department of Justice determined that the facts of the case did not support federal criminal charges.