Tag Archives: concentration

The deeply racist Nobel Prize-winning novelist William Faulkner once wrote in his 1951 novel, Requiem for a Nun, that the past isn’t dead, it’s not even past. In that same book Faulkner has the “nun,” which carries the meaning of prostitute in Shakespeare’s time, a Black drug addict named Nancy, offer that salvation comes from suffering. And though this is …

We’re not talking about the mind today, but of internment, and ghettos, of settlement camps. Today’s conversation focuses on the history and origins of concentration, a form of biopolitics that seeks to manage and structure the movement of social groups in a predictable manner. Modern forms of concentration have become a nearly ubiquitous force of social structuring: from mass incarceration …