A timely and provocative discussion of alienation as an
intersectional category of life under racial capitalism and white
supremacy
From the divisiveness of the Trump era to the Covid-19 pandemic,
...alienation has become an all-too-familiar contemporary concept. In
this groundbreaking book, James A. Tyner offers a novel framework
for understanding the alienated subject, situating it within racial
capitalism and white supremacy. Directly addressing current
economic trends and their rhetoric of xenophobia, discrimination,
and violence, The Alienated Subject exposes the universal
whitewashing of alienation.
Drawing insight from a variety of sources, including Marxism,
feminism, existentialism, and critical race theory, Tyner develops
a critique of both the liberal subject and the alienated subject.
Through an engagement with the recent pandemic and the Black Lives
Matter movement, he demonstrates how the alienated subject is
capable of both compassion and cruelty; it is a sadomasochist.
Tyner goes on to emphasize the importance of the particular places
we find the alienated subject and how the revolutionary
transformation of alienation is inherently a spatial struggle.
Returning to key interlocutors from Sartre to Fromm, he examines
political notions of distance and the spatial practices of everyday
life as well as the capitalist conditions that give rise to the
alienated subject.
For Tyner, the alienated subject is not the iconic, romanticized
image of Marx's proletariat. Here he calls for an affirmation of
love as a revolutionary concept, necessary for the transformation
of a society marred by capitalism into an emancipated, caring
society conditioned by socially just relations.
The subject of ‘population’ is undergoing a renaissance in geography; this is seen, for example, in the voluminous studies addressing ‘marginalized’ populations, including but not limited to ...refugees, internally displaced persons, and children. In short, scholarship has focused on those lives rendered ‘wasted’, ‘precarious’, or ‘superfluous’. Population geographers have made substantial contributions; however, more can be done. In this and the next two progress reports, I suggest that population geographers reflect more deeply on the spatiality and survivability of vulnerable populations. More specifically, population geographers should consider the politics of fertility, mortality, and mobility from the standpoint of a layered demographic question: within any given place, who lives, who dies, and who decides? In this first report, I resituate the concept ‘surplus population’ within the broader domain of population geography. In subsequent reports, I consider more closely population geography’s association with related subject areas (i.e. biopolitics and necropolitics). I maintain that, by addressing vulnerability and survivability, we join others in geography and allied fields who are writing about ‘populations’ not as biological, pre-given entities, but instead as political subjects at risk of premature death.
Through a reading of H.G. Wells' nineteenth-century dystopian novel, The Island of Dr. Moreau, I draw on the concept of the monstrous feminine in an attempt to rethink transhumanism in the ...Anthropocene and subsequently contribute to the theorization of 'gestational geographies'. More precisely, I find in Wells' speculative fiction an opportunity to think through the intersection of race, class, gender, and sexuality as mediated in broader reproductive politics. To that end, my objectives are two-fold. First, I interrogate the (re)productive labors of Moreau, that is, the physical work performed by the vivisectionist and the intent of his experimentations. In so doing I underscore the political economy of Moreau's activities and emphasize the imbrication of racial capitalism, colonialism, and slavery. Next, I recast the subject-position of Moreau. Here, I argue that Moreau embodies a perverse form of the monstrous feminine as he attempts to replace the maternal with the machine, a masculinist appropriation of the vicissitudes of reproduction for the purpose of rational biological production. By way of conclusions, I argue that Moreau, similar to contemporary transhumanists, sought to perfect upon evolution and to eliminate the indeterminacy and unpredictability of sexual reproduction and, to that end, Moreau personifies the desire of a masculinist science centered on the sphere of production to coopt women's productive capabilities.
President Nixon's announcement on April 30, 1970, that US troops were invading neutral Cambodia as part of the ongoing Vietnam War campaign sparked a complicated series of events with tragic ...consequences on many fronts.In Cambodia, the invasion renewed calls for a government independent of western power and influence, eventually resulting in a civil war and the rise of the Khmer Rouge. Here at home, Nixon's expansion of the war galvanized the longstanding anti-Vietnam War movement, including at Kent State University, leading to the tragic shooting deaths of four students on May 4, 1970.This short book concisely contextualizes these events, filling a gap in the popular memory of the 1970 shootings and the wider conceptions of the war in Southeast Asia. In three brief chapters, James A. Tyner and Mindy Farmer provide background on the decade of activism around the United States that preceded the events on Kent State's campus, an overview of Cambodia's history and developments following the US incursion, and a closing section on historical memory-poignantly tying together the subject matter of the preceding chapters.As we grapple with the legacy of the Kent State shootings, Tyner and Farmer assert, we should also grapple with the larger context of the protests, of the decision to bomb and invade a neutral country, and the violence and genocide that followed.
Population geography II Tyner, James A.
Progress in human geography,
06/2015, Volume:
39, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
The geographic study of mortality is enjoying a renaissance. This is indicated by the growing number of studies on necropolitics, thanatopolitics, ‘deathscapes’, and the inequalities of premature ...death. Population geographers, however, have contributed little to the broader theoretical conceptualization – and spatiality – of mortality. Previously, I encouraged population geographers to reflect on the survivability of vulnerable populations. In this second progress report, I extend this focus through a reconsideration of mortality from the standpoint of survivability. As a discipline, population geography has long engaged with the concept of ‘premature’ death; here it is indicated how this concept is intimately bound to the modernist ordering of life that dominates our contemporary understanding of bodies and populations. First, I reflect on the embodiment of mortality, and this is followed by a critical engagement with the ‘bio-logics’ of life and death. I maintain that population geography is well positioned to contribute to ongoing debates regarding who lives, who dies, and who decides.
The Philippines Tyner, James A.
2009, 20101222, 2008, 2008-08-25, 2010-12-22, Volume:
4
eBook
Nearly five million migrant workers from the Philippines are employed in over 190 countries and territories. They work as doctors and domestic helpers, engineers and entertainers, seamstresses and ...surveyors. It is through their collective labor that the Philippines has assumed a global presence.
For over five centuries the Philippines has been integrated into the world economy. Only recently, however, has the Philippines been a pro-active agent in the production of a global economy. Since the 1970s the Philippine state, in connection with myriad private institutions, has recruited, trained, marketed, and deployed a mobile work-force. Annually, approximately one million migrant workers travel to all corners of the world. The Philippines seeks to understand how the Philippines has become the world’s largest exporter of government-sponsored temporary contract labor and, in the process, has dramatically reshaped both the processes of globalization and also our understanding of globalization as concept.
1. Local Contexts, Distant Horizons 2. Manufacturing a Global Presence 3. Manila's Place in the World 4. Global-Philippines.Com 5. Performing Globalization 6. Beyond the Philippines
James A. Tyner (Ph.D., University of Southern California) is Professor of Geography at Kent State University. His research interests include population geography, political geography, and Southeast Asia. He is the author of nine books, including Made in the Philippines: Gendered Discourses and the Making of Migrants (Routledge).
Lives in Waiting Chattopadhyay, Sutapa; Tyner, James A.
Geopolitics,
08/2022, Volume:
27, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
The major contribution of this research is the analysis of chronic waiting of mobile subjects whose unclassifiability can neither situate them here nor there. Their undefinable political ...belongingness, spatial in-betweeness, alleged racial and ethnic impurity justifies the multi-modal and multi-axial forms of direct and indirect violence through extreme regulations, exceptional policies, brutality of police, border controls and profound exclusion of ordinary citizens. Illegalised border crossers' encounter this ordeal as they challenge the sacramental aspect of border rituals becoming sacrificial subjects of the state. The justification of criminalising the travelling anti-citizens as security threats place visible and invisible borders that snare them into agonizing moments of waiting. This research focuses on the subaltern migrants experiencing abject precarity, vulnerability and uncertainty due to chronic waiting in the bureaucratic context of immigration controls and management. We drew upon migrants' stories, informed by participatory principles, collected in different stages through short/preliminary surveys from Madrid (Spain) and Rome (Italy) conducted between 2013 and 2015. Their stories directed the conceptualisation of waiting as a salient feature of their everyday lives. Within the contemporary capitalist world order, marked by neoliberalism and militarism, the bureaucratically imposed conditions of waiting is political and intersectional, superimposed on citizenship, geography and history. In conclusion, we suggest, commoning, with its limitations, as a possibility to cope with the violence of waiting.
What, James Tyner asks, separates the murder of a runaway youth from the death of a father denied a bone-marrow transplant because of budget cuts? Moving beyond our culture's reductive emphasis on ...whether a given act of violence is intentional-and may therefore count as deliberate murder-Tyner interrogates the broader forces that produce violence. His uniquely geographic perspective considers where violence takes place (the workplace, the home, the prison, etc.) and how violence moves across space.
Approaching violence as one of several methods of constituting space, Tyner examines everything from the way police departments map crime to the emergence of "environmental criminology." Throughout, he casts violence in broad terms-as a realm that is not limited to criminal acts and one that can be divided into the categories of "killing" and "letting die." His framework extends the study of biopolitics by examining the state's role in producing (or failing to produce) a healthy citizenry. It also adds to the new literature on capitalism by articulating the interconnections between violence and political economy. Simply put, capitalism (especially its neoliberal and neoconservative variants) is structured around a valuation of life that fosters a particular abstraction of violence and crime.
Between 1975 and 1979 approximately two million men, women, and children died during the Cambodian genocide. These deaths are attributed to specific administrative policies and practices initiated by ...the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK), all of which were geared toward the basic objective of increasing agricultural production as a means of building socialism. A crucial question regarding these practices was whether the CPK implemented policies designed specifically to destroy the traditional family structure of Cambodia. Drawing on the work of Silvia Federici, this article argues that policies and practices forwarded by the CPK constitute a variation of primitive accumulation; and that transformations of the traditional family structure were conditioned by the overall social organization of production initiated by the CPK. However, a more pressing form of gendered violence is apparent - a mode that pivots on the social ordering of the CPK's political economy.
Tyner comments on the concept of famine, violence and the international politics of letting die. He cites essay Alex de Waal's essay acknowledging the deep connections between the politics of ...persecution, dictatorship, conquest and genocide, and the occurrence of mass starvation. These connections relate directly to de Waal's guiding question, namely that efforts to reduce or eliminate famine have not only stalled, but that progress toward the elimination of mass starvation has reversed. De Waal argues mat famine mortality has declined, and identifies several possible causes for a decline in famines, including increases in agricultural productivity, and highlights several factors that mediate food availability, including income inequality, functioning food markets, public health, and climate change.
