Steppe Immunity

Christian Sorace is Associate Professor of Global China at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College. He is the author of Shaken Authority: China's Communist Party and the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake (2017).

"Sorace's kaleidoscopic and elegant book presents Mongolia as both a unique political existence and a paradoxical metaphor for sovereignty without borders. Writing pensively, Sorace demonstrates how Mongolia is entrenched in the political jungle of macho nationalism, communist legacy, environmental disasters, and development struggles, while still advancing a potential steppe project of emancipation." —Pang Laikwan, Chinese University of Hong Kong"One of the great strengths of this polymathic book is that it defies any easy effort to categorize its domain. A profound critique of sovereignty, capitalism, and the nation-state, this work offers a detailed historical analysis of Mongolia, its deviation from normative communisms, and its potential power to assist any effort to produce a new communist counter-imaginary. The contradictory forms of immunity that seek either to monopolize or distribute protection shore up sovereignty and destroy the possibility of common life. Considered critically, immunity names not only a common condition but the shared task of world building amidst the debris of failed sovereignty and exhausted forms of liberal democracy. This work shows how to read history theoretically and to reformulate theory through concrete and probing historical work. Engaging the living world implies human life inhabiting the planet with organisms, animals, and land both sedimented with history and an implied biopolitics of living in the open. Brilliantly, Sorace makes the case for imagining a new communism through considering those regional practices at a distance from nation-state and sovereignty, afflicted and relational. In this book, communism becomes a way of bringing discarded inheritances to bear on building a future in which sovereignty has lost its own self-protective logics and human creatures can learn to live beyond the incessant need to guard themselves against the planet to which they belong as lives among the living." —Judith Butler, author of What World is This? A Pandemic Phenomenology