Towards a Global Genealogy of Biopolitics: Race, Colonialism, and Biometrics beyond Europe

Abstract

This paper examines, at the global scale, the biopolitical strategy of racism that Foucault articulated in the context of 19th-century Europe. Through my historical analysis both of the emergent notion of race and of biometric production of racial knowledge during Japanese colonialism, I endeavour to delineate a circulation of a political rationality of modern racism, which became globally generalised and constitutive of the formation of a non-Western nation-state. I argue that this emergence of global biopolitics, however, should not simply be reduced to a unitary operation but needs to be understood as the process of multiplication that reveals both the continuity and the contingency of the biopolitical strategy of racism in relation to particular spatiotemporal configurations. Furthermore, through an archaeological reading of Foucault on modern racism, I will suggest that Foucault's Society Must be Defended, albeit arguably underdeveloped in its geographical scope of analysis, can shed light on the operation of biopolitics and modern racism beyond the history of Europe.