05/06/2026
The Cogut Institute for the Humanities presents a keynote talk, “‘The Defense of Society Has Been Betrayed’: Ensoulment and the Politics of History on the Far Right Today,” by scholar Leerom Medovoi (University of Arizona) for the conference “Race and Its Avatars: Literary Identity Politics from the Medieval to the Present.” Join us Thursday, May 7, 3:30 – 5 pm in the White Family Salon (Room 110) in Andrews House, 13 Brown St.
The explosive international growth of the Far Right in recent years has been buoyed by various forms of anti-immigrant and anti-elite racisms that lay claim on national history in the name of reviving its greatness. This talk explicates a strategy of power called “ensoulment” that animates these new modes of racialization. Ensoulment involves the exercise of knowledge/power over people by means of biopolitical processes that constitute them as a population against whom, as Michel Foucault once put it, “society must be defended.” The Far Right’s racial politics today, however, presuppose that the defense of society has always already been betrayed. They posit conspiratorial aims, long at the secret heart of national history, that act as a covert race war waged against its very life. In this way, the Far Right combines the historical discourse of race war and the modernizing discourse of biopower into a new kind of enemy-making politics.
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About the Author
Leerom Medovoi is Professor of English and Founding Chair of the Graduate Program in Social, Cultural and Critical Theory at the University of Arizona. He is the author of “Rebels: Youth and the Cold War Origins of Identity” (Duke University Press, 2005) and “The Inner Life of Race: Bodies, Souls, and the History of Racial Power” (Duke University Press, 2024). He publishes on biopolitical theory, critical race studies, and the environmental humanities. He was the PI on two Mellon grants with collaborative interdisciplinary research teams. The first grant explored religion and secularism’s changing relations to political life across the post-cold war globe. The second grant explored the neoliberal underpinnings of emergent far-right populist movements with focus on North America, Europe and South Asia. He was a Visiting Scholar at the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley in 2021–22, and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Central European University in 2025–26.
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About the Conference
The conference “Race and Its Avatars: Literary Identity Politics from the Medieval to the Present” takes place May 7, 9:45 am – 5 pm, and features presentations from seven students in the spring 2026 ENGL 2762A seminar taught by Daniel Kim and Mariah Min. The seminar and conference are devoted to developing an understanding of “racism” as “a singular history” (Étienne Balibar), consisting of a number of racisms with “no fixed frontiers” that can cross-contaminate each other across wide expanses of time and space.
Read more about the conference: https://buff.ly/7LgKRKw
Literature
