Alexander Weheliye's Habeas Viscus is the latest iteration in the current reinvigoration of black diasporic thought.... Habeas Viscus feeds into this furiously complex joyful noise. -- Dhanveer Singh Brar * New Formations *
It is a book that offers us a meditation for imagining a world where the categorization and organization that produces race, and racialist distinction and hierarchy - where human life - might be organized otherwise than it is. -- Ashon Crawley * Los Angeles Review of Books *
Habeas Viscus is a work with vast implications for the rereading of canonical works of biopolitics, as well as the reframing of biopolitics from the 'other' side. The arguments and techniques provided in the book will not only be of interest to scholars of race, feminism, and biopolitics, but also to those engaged with disability studies, affect theory, and even animal/ity studies. For this last group in particular, Habeas Viscus will be a haunting incantation for reconsidering the meanings and boundaries of human and nonhuman life, where 'flesh' is proved liminal, belonging neither to the realm of Man nor beast. -- Megan H. Glick * Hypatia *
Weheliye's dual theoretical-political aim of clarifying the operating force of racializing assemblages as well as voicing the necessity and potentiality of alternate political futures is an urgently needed intervention in conversations about the human and humanity. Not satisfied with critiquing the perils of our contemporary condition, he orients us towards new futures. In doing so, Weheliye's Habeus Viscus offers intellectual victuals not only for the project of black studies, but for all those who study non-white being-in-the-world and are relegated to the conceptual ghetto of ethnographic specificity. -- Aditi Surie von Czechowski * Borderlines (CSSAAME blog) *
Habeas Viscus is a long-awaited contribution in the slowly awakening critical debates on the place of the concepts of race and racialization within the discourses on biopolitics and bare life underpinning many scholarly debates concerned with political violence, neoliberal capitalism and converging systems of oppression in Western critical theory. More importantly, coming from the standpoint of black studiesand drawing largely from black feminist thought, this critical account of poststructuralist take on the category of the human, promises not only to redraw the blueprints of this prominent theoretical formation, but also to deterritorialise minority discourses, so far relegated to academic peripheries. -- Marianna Szczygielska * Parallax *
In the age of the Anthropocene, Habeas Viscus helps us hear, feel, and imagine humanities that persist beyond Man's catastrophic horizons. -- Annie Menzel * Theory & Event *
Weheliye's book is a major philosophical accomplishment. It expertly dispatches with the fantasy of the liberal subject by making racialization the central problem of the human. It broadens the agenda and intellectual reach of black studies into the realm of humanity. In these endeavors, it makes gender and black feminism central to these investigations, and it brings us back to the all-important question of the body and how to think with and through it. That Weheliye stays attentive to all of these questions while articulating damning critiques about biopolitics, bare life, and racism, is an important feat to behold. -- Amber Jamilla Musser * philoSOPHIA *
