Marketing and web analytic companies have implemented sophisticated algorithms to observe, analyze, and identify users through large surveillance networks online. These computer algorithms have the capacity to infer categories of identity upon users based largely on their web-surfing habits. In this article I will first discuss the conceptual and theoretical work around code, outlining its use ...

How do we expect the Muslim woman, collectively and individually, to identify with Islam as revered teachings and to act within its parameters, and to accommodate new human knowledge, be it that of a local Mufti's (clergy) injunction or a human rights advocate's recommendation, while neither Muslim societies nor human rights advocates recognize her self-identity as an autonomous spiritual and i...

Baiqi is a place recognized in Fujian, a coastal province in south China, for its Hui ethnicity. However, the ethnic identity of its citizens was not really established until recent decades. As scholars have noted, though the Hui identity in south Fujian has been constructed under a preferential policy carried out by the state, it was impossible for it to have come into existence without its so...

The paper attempts to understand ways in which gender and racially defined communal ideologies worked simultaneously to produce Muslim women in colonial Bengal as invisible within nationalist historiography. It argues that the negative representations of Muslim women underpinned the construction of other identity categories in colonial Bengal, and highlights the participation of Hindu/Brahmo wo...

This paper explores the analytical relevance of Foucault’s notion of biopower in the context of regulating and managing non-human lives and populations, specifically those animals that are the focus of livestock breeding based on genetic techniques. The concept of biopower is seen as offering theoretical possibilities precisely because it is concerned with the regulation of life and of populati...

The murder of Theo van Gogh in 2004 shocked Dutch society. Soon after, debates emerged about the nature of Islam and whether Islam is compatible with ‘Dutch’ democracy and freedoms. There were those among Muslims who praised Mohammed Bouyeri’s actions for being, as he claimed, an expression of true faith, while others condemned the attack as being against the true nature of Islam. Such utteranc...

straightforward indexes of identity. This lacks analytic validity but reveals the linguistic ideologies upon which the politics of nationalism often turn (Bauman and Briggs 2003). Following Stewart (2001), we should be cautious of modern notions that linguistic form (e.g., Bengali discourse full of Sanskritor Perso-Arabic-derived words) directly reflects an author’s politico-religious stance or...

In this article we undertake some conceptual clarification of the concepts of biopower and biopolitics, and argue for their utility in contemporary analysis. We consider Foucault’s development of these concepts, and differentiate his view, which is close to ours, from the philosophical take-up of the terms by Giorgio Agamben and Antonio Negri. Biopower, we suggest, entails one or more truth dis...

By approaching Namcheon Kim’s short story “On the Road” (1939) from new mobilities paradigm, this paper explores paradoxical relationship between colonial government and postcolonial politics in late Korea. In story, Korean territories 1930s are represented as “non-places,” which is exercised imperialistic biopower through mobility. The people residing non-places characterized bare lives on-the...

This paper analyzes whether the religious identity of political leaders in India influences policy-determined variation in health outcomes, both for citizens of their religious group and for the population as a whole. In order to analyze the causal effect of the religious identity of politicians, we take advantage of the fact that some Muslim politicians contested in close elections against non...