By Banu Bargu
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Date: 10/04/2025
Description:
Disembodiment examines self-destruction, self-injury, and radical self-endangerment as unconventional performances of refusal that are erased, marginalized, and distorted by metanarratives of history as progress and agency as freedom. From the death-acts of enslaved Africans, hunger strikes of woman suffragists, and Gandhian fasting practices to the self-incineration of Bouazizi, hunger and thirst strikes in the Maze and Guantánamo, and lip-sewing practices of migrants and asylum seekers at the borders of the Global North today, Bargu traces a bleak repertoire of contention performed by the oppressed. As a work in global critical theory whose normative compass is the suffering body, Disembodiment brings together corporeal enactments of defiance from the Global South with major thinkers of Western modernity and prominent critical-theoretical traditions of the twentieth century. Bargu offers a materialist theory of corporeal agency that upholds the rebelliousness of the body.