Photo by Emma Quirk ‘26. Medovoi, pictured above, discussing his upcoming book.
By Emma Quirk ’26
Publisher, Photos Editor & Staff Writer
Students and faculty listened intently as Lee Medovoi discussed his forthcoming book “The Inner Life of Race: Souls, Bodies, and the History of Racial Power.” Medovoi, professor of English and vice chair of the graduate program in social, cultural and critical theory at the University of Arizona, visited Mount Holyoke College on Wednesday, Feb. 21, to give a lecture titled ‘Racial Capitalism, Civil Society & Police Power.’
This lecture was hosted by the Department of Critical Race and Political Economy and co-sponsored by the English and politics departments. Vanessa Rosa, associate professor of Latinx studies and co-chair of critical race and political economy, gave the opening remarks, read the land acknowledgment and introduced Medovoi.
Medovoi began his lecture by giving an overview of the general themes of “The Inner Life of Race.” His research was guided by the question, “What would happen if we try to theorize racism as a mode of politics [...] that can be articulated around a generalized politics of security, a management of threats, where what you're involved in is the targeting of populations in the name of a larger social defense,” Medovoi said.
In the book, Medovoi delves into ideas of terrorism and “the way that terrorism is about a kind of obsession with the inner life of the individual who might threaten.” Because of this focus on interiority, Medovoi says that he “became convinced that there's some kind of dialectic of body and soul that functions at the heart of the way that racism operates.” He continued, saying that he “[coins] a term in the book called ensoulment [...] ensoulment is basically the way that we produce politically social conclusions that are drawn about what kind of threat a population might pose that then gets integrated into a project of social control.”
Medovoi spent the rest of the talk discussing the fourth chapter of his book, which focuses on capitalism, particularly the connections between capitalism, race and the police.
Throughout the event, Medovoi referenced scholars such as Michel Foucault, Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Stuart Hall and expanded on their ideas. Expanding on Gilmore’s work on racial capitalism, Medovoi explained that, “In short, capitalism creates inequality, police translate it into racial threat and racism then enshrines it.”
He pushes back against the notion that capitalism and racism are solely reliant on one another, reasoning that an unequal division of labor is not always associated with populations deemed as threats. Medovoi argues that he aims to look beyond just race and class and focus on the relationship between race, value and security.
Medovoi concluded by discussing the police — the history of the word itself, the shifts in power and the role of police in the modern day. He noted that in the late 17th and 18th centuries, along with the rise of capitalism, the police, who had been tasked with regulating the market, began to concentrate on protecting private property and preventing crime.
Coming back to Foucault’s ideations on sovereignty, Medovoi talked about the way that sovereign and political power can come together as state racism.
“I want to suggest that police power is, above all, a liberal technology of racializing governance that authorizes violence in the name of fostering the value that's generated by the life of civil society,” Medovoi said. “I want to stress the highly flexible notion of race that I'm talking about here and [which is] allowed by this process. Police may not claim to know at any given moment who is the member of society, who is the enemy or even what kind of enemy we're talking about.”
After this, Medovoi ended his lecture, and the event turned to the Q&A portion. Students and faculty alike asked Medovoi many questions about his research and book, ranging from what the role of prisons is to how these racialized threats exist on a broader scale, particularly concerning colonialism.
Overall, “It was wonderful to see so many students attend [the event],” Rosa said. “I was impressed by the thoughtful questions and engagement during the Q&A.”