Joseph Pugliese - Böcker

State Violence and the Execution of Law stages a provocative analysis of how the biopolitical divide between human and animal has played a fundamental role in enabling state violence, including torture, secret imprisonment and killing-at-a-distance via drones. Analyzing the complex ways in which the United States government deploys law in order to consolidate and further imperial relations of power, Pugliese tracks the networks that enable the diffusion and normalization of the state’s monopoly of violence both in the US and in an international context. He demonstrates how networks of state violence are embedded within key legal institutions, military apparatuses, civilian sites, corporations, carceral architectures, and advanced technologies. The author argues that the exercise of state violence, as unleashed by the war on terror, has enmeshed the subjects of the Global South within institutional and discursive structures that position them as non-human animals that can be tortured, killed and disappeared with impunity. Drawing on poststructuralist, critical race and whiteness, and critical legal theories, the book is transdisciplinary in its approach and value. It will be invaluable to university students and scholars in Critical Legal and Socio-Legal Studies, Cultural Studies, Race and Ethnicity Studies, International Politics, and Postcolonial Studies.

Biometric technologies, such as finger- or facial-scan, are being deployed across a variety of social contexts in order to facilitate and guarantee identity verification and authentication. In the post-9/11 world, biometric technologies have experienced an extraordinary period of growth as concerns about security and screening have increased. This book analyses biometric systems in terms of the application of biopolitical power – corporate, military and governmental – on the human body. It deploys cultural theory in examining the manner in which biometric technologies constitute the body as a target of surveillance and as a data-information object. The book thereby provides a comprehensive overview and critical analysis of both the local and global ramifications of biometric technologies.

State Violence and the Execution of Law examines how law plays a fundamental role in enabling state violence and, specifically, specifically, torture, secret imprisonment, and killing-at-a-distance. Analysing the complex ways in which the U.S. government deploys law in order to consolidate and further colonial and imperial relations of power, Joseph Pugliese tracks the networks that enable the diffusion and normalisation of the state’s monopoly of legitimate violence both in the U.S. and transnationally. He demonstrates how these networks of state violence are embedded within key legal institutions (US Department of Justice), military apparatuses (U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), civic sites (McCarran airport, Las Vegas), corporations (Boeing), carceral architectures (CIA Salt Pit, Kabul, and Guantánamo), and advanced technologies (unmanned aerial combat vehicles). Law’s violence, it is maintained, is always preoccupied with the body: its torture, extortion or extermination. The exercise of state violence, it is argued, must be considered in situated locations that evidence the enmeshment of the body within geopolitical configurations of bio and necropower. For it is in these locations that law plays a foundational role in enabling and legitimising regimes of racialised violence. Drawing on poststructuralist, feminist, queer, critical legal, whiteness and anti-colonial theories, State Violence and Execution of Law brings into focus the contractual imbrication of the state with arms corporations and the contemporary military-industrial complex.

Biometric technologies, such as finger- or facial-scan, are being deployed across a variety of social contexts in order to facilitate and guarantee identity verification and authentication. In the post-9/11 world, biometric technologies have experienced an extraordinary period of growth as concerns about security and screening have increased. This book analyses biometric systems in terms of the application of biopolitical power – corporate, military and governmental – on the human body. It deploys cultural theory in examining the manner in which biometric technologies constitute the body as a target of surveillance and as a data-information object. The book thereby provides a comprehensive overview and critical analysis of both the local and global ramifications of biometric technologies.

This volume offers a critical and creative analysis of the innovations of Deathscapes, a transnational digital humanities project that maps the sites and distributions of custodial deaths in locations such as police cells, prisons and immigration detention centres.An international team of authors take a multidisciplinary approach to questions of race, geographies of state violence and countermaps of resistance across North America, Australia and Europe. The book establishes rich lines of dialogic connection between digital and other media by incorporating both traditional scholarly resources and digital archives, databases and social media. Chapters offer a comprehensive mapping of the key attributes through which racial violence is addressed and contested through digital media and articulate, in the process, the distinctive dimensions of the Deathscapes site.This interdisciplinary volume will be an important resource for scholars, students and activists working in the areas of Cultural Studies, Media and Visual Studies, Indigenous Studies, Refugee Studies and Law.

This volume offers a critical and creative analysis of the innovations of Deathscapes, a transnational digital humanities project that maps the sites and distributions of custodial deaths in locations such as police cells, prisons and immigration detention centres.An international team of authors take a multidisciplinary approach to questions of race, geographies of state violence and countermaps of resistance across North America, Australia and Europe. The book establishes rich lines of dialogic connection between digital and other media by incorporating both traditional scholarly resources and digital archives, databases and social media. Chapters offer a comprehensive mapping of the key attributes through which racial violence is addressed and contested through digital media and articulate, in the process, the distinctive dimensions of the Deathscapes site.This interdisciplinary volume will be an important resource for scholars, students and activists working in the areas of Cultural Studies, Media and Visual Studies, Indigenous Studies, Refugee Studies and Law.

Pugliese’s More‑Than‑Human Diasporas breaks the confines of existing scholarship in its vision of the way that more‑than‑human diasporic entities—such as water, trees, clay, stone and architectural styles—have functioned as agents within the context of empire, settler colonialism and a largely effaced history of Mediterranean enslavement, a history that pre‑existed and then coincided with the Atlantic slave trade. This book traces, for example, the diasporic travels of the eucalyptus from Indigenous Country to Joseph Banks’ botanical collection in London and then onto a grand English‑style garden in Southern Italy which was built on the historically effaced labour of enslaved people.By deploying techniques of historical recovery, this book brings to light otherwise buried histories, thereby demonstrating the pivotal role of Mediterranean enslavement in the shaping of Italian society and culture. This book develops a topological understanding of cultural history to account for the complex spatio‑temporal effects that connect seemingly disparate times, spaces and more‑than‑human entities within networks of relationality. In this innovative scholarly work, more‑than‑human diasporic entities function as conceptual keys to histories which would otherwise remain hidden, thereby revealing desubjugated knowledges which reconfigure anthropocentric histories and further the process of decolonisation.This book will be of interest to readers interested in transnational and local histories of empire, settler colonialism and slavery.

Pugliese’s More‑Than‑Human Diasporas breaks the confines of existing scholarship in its vision of the way that more‑than‑human diasporic entities—such as water, trees, clay, stone and architectural styles—have functioned as agents within the context of empire, settler colonialism and a largely effaced history of Mediterranean enslavement, a history that pre‑existed and then coincided with the Atlantic slave trade. This book traces, for example, the diasporic travels of the eucalyptus from Indigenous Country to Joseph Banks’ botanical collection in London and then onto a grand English‑style garden in Southern Italy which was built on the historically effaced labour of enslaved people.By deploying techniques of historical recovery, this book brings to light otherwise buried histories, thereby demonstrating the pivotal role of Mediterranean enslavement in the shaping of Italian society and culture. This book develops a topological understanding of cultural history to account for the complex spatio‑temporal effects that connect seemingly disparate times, spaces and more‑than‑human entities within networks of relationality. In this innovative scholarly work, more‑than‑human diasporic entities function as conceptual keys to histories which would otherwise remain hidden, thereby revealing desubjugated knowledges which reconfigure anthropocentric histories and further the process of decolonisation.This book will be of interest to readers interested in transnational and local histories of empire, settler colonialism and slavery.

In Biopolitics of the More-Than-Human Joseph Pugliese examines the concept of the biopolitical through a nonanthropocentric lens, arguing that more-than-human entities-from soil and orchards to animals and water-are actors and agents in their own right with legitimate claims to justice. Examining occupied Palestine, GuantÁnamo, and sites of US drone strikes in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen, Pugliese challenges notions of human exceptionalism by arguing that more-than-human victims of war and colonialism are entangled with and subject to the same violent biopolitical regimes as humans. He also draws on Indigenous epistemologies that invest more-than-human entities with judicial standing to argue for an ethico-legal framework that will enable the realization of ecological justice. Bringing the more-than-human world into the purview of justice, Pugliese makes visible the ecological effects of human war that would otherwise remain outside the domains of biopolitics and law.