Studies of the Americas Necropolitics - R Guy Emerson Gebunden

This book offers a contemporary look at violence in Mexico and argues for a recalibration in how necropolitics as the administration of life and death is understood. The author locates the forces of mortality directly on the body rather than as an object of government thereby placing death in a politics of the everyday. This necropolitics is explored through testimonies of individuals living in towns overrun by organized crime and resistance groups namely the autodefensa movement that operate throughout Michoacán one of the most violent states in Mexico. This volume studies how individ uals and communities go on living not in spite of the death that surrounds life but more disturbingly by attuning to it.