Necrosociety, Mortispolitics, and Miquiztli-politics challenges the underlying assumptions of necropolitics and biopolitics, exploring core concepts such as neoliberalism, neonationalism, and decoloniality, and proposing a new framework that expands our comprehension of these two domains.
The book opens by discussing the existing conceptual debates around how we can best conceptualize the political interplay of life and death. It then moves on to explore necrosociety, mortispolitics, and Miquiztli-politics, three concepts put forward as alternative concepts in approaching the politics of life and death. The book posits that the concepts of biopolitics and necropolitics ought to be oriented within the theoretical framework of postcolonial, anticolonial, and decolonial theories. This framing clarifies the ongoing global structural differences between countries operating within a global and internal colonialism context, allowing the reader to see another side of biopolitical and necropolitical issues. "Necrosociety" attempts to articulate dimensions that biopolitics and necropolitics have not yet addressed, exploring a sociological dimension where death has extended to the point that it goes hand in hand with capitalism, producing and multiplying the social and natural-world deaths. Second, "mortispolitics" is created as an alternative category that acknowledges death. Mortispolitics builds upon the notion of death as seen in necropolitics, but instead of focusing on the state of exception, it examines the state of the law. The book uses the North–South distinction because this concept applies only to North America, specifically the United States and Mexico. It articulates a new notion of death, one based on Amerindian peoples' ideas of sacrifice and cannibalism, arguing for a conception of death that extends beyond necropolitics.
Analyzing the interplay between life and death through a political lens, Necrosociety, Mortispolitics, and Miquiztli-politics will be of great interest to students and scholars of political philosophy, political theory, postcolonialism, and Latin American Studies.