Overview

The Suicidal State theorizes a biopolitics of suicide by mapping the entwinement between the Progressive-Era discourse of

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9780197690079

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Reviews

Madoka Kishi's new book introduces a truly novel theory of queer biopolitics with an added bonus: the welcome arrival of an incisive intellectual historian. Taking seriously debunked ideologies of 'race suicide'- and seriously taking them to historical task - The Suicidal State mixes and mashes up literature, critiques of the state, and difficult questions of agency. With nimble readings of how this derided concept winds its way through fiction by Gertrude Stein, Henry James, and other luminaries, Kishi gifts us an exceptional, frequently startling account of reproduction, racialization, and the promising perils of social 'unbeing.' * Scott Herring, Yale University * Madoka Kishi's remarkable new book reads white-supremacist anxieties about the threat of 'racial suicide'- a trope whose fatal echo shapes contemporary anti-immigrant discourse - against the backdrop of early twentieth-century literary suicides. Brilliantly weaving together American constructions of nationality, race, and gender with the pursuit of reproductive domination by persons of white European descent, The Suicidal State makes a dazzling case for viewing the choice of non-being as a response to the brutal political ontology that posits certain racialized subjects both as socially dead and as harbingers of death for the racial order of power on which American society rests. This is a must-read book for our times. * Lee Edelman, Tufts University * The Suicidal State shows us how the state came to long for the erotics of death in the Progressive Era: at the moment when self-murder became suicide and the body politic became the social body, race crossed with sex to deliver and imperil white reproduction. Kishi's arguments are a series of lapidary cuts that expose new desires that glitter with what they cut away, and each chapter presents a revelatory reading of a life canted toward collective death - New England neurasthenic, Creole flirt, totemic Teuton, and the excretory American. The final turn to ill-fated Butterfly lashes this era to our present, and Kishi's understanding here - brilliantly limpid and profoundly felt - demonstrates, in her words, 'how to live on in a suicidal state.' * Josephine Park, University of Pennsylvania *

Author Information

Madoka Kishi is a Professional in Residence in English at Louisiana State University. She has translated Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Touching Feeling (Takanashi-shobo, 2022) and co-translated Judith Butler's Parting Ways (Seido-sha, 2019) into Japanese. She has published essays in the Journal of American Studies, The Henry James Review, and the Journal of Modern Literature and is currently co-translating Lauren Berlant's Cruel Optimism for Kadensha (forthcoming, 2024).

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