The contributors to Sovereignty Unhinged theorize sovereignty beyond the typical understandings of action, control, and the nation-state, considering it from the perspective of how it is lived and enacted in everyday practice and how it reflects people’s aspirations for new futures.

Acknowledgments  vii
Introduction. Feeling Unhinged / Joseph Masco and Deborah A. Thomas  1
Part I. Capture/Escape
1. Love and Disgust: Sovereignty Struggles in Egypt’s Uprising / Jessica Winegar  27
2. Tasting Sovereignty: Love and Revolution in Peru / María Elena García  45
3. Death and Disavowal / Deborah A. Thomas  71
4. Pandemic Déjà Vu / Yarimar Bonilla  88
Interlude I. Wading in the Thick: A Sovereign Encounter through Collage / Leniqueca A. Welcome  96
Part II. Breaking/Making
5. Affective Sovereignties: Mobility, Emplacement, Potentiality / Purnima Mankekar and Akhil Gupta  113
6. Sovereign Interdependencies / Jessica Cattelino  139
7. Moral Economies, Developmentalist Sovereignty, and Affective Strain / Arjun Shankar  162
8. The Slaughterhouse after Surplus Value / Alex Blanchette  185
Interlude 2. The Lung Is a Bird and a Fish / Lochlann Jain  211
Part III. Exclusion/Embrace
9. i was dreaming when i wrote this: a mixtape for America / Kristen L. Simmons and Kaya Naomi Williams  241
10. The Sovereignty of Vulnerability / Danilyn Rutherford  263
11. The Condition of Our Condition / Joseph Masco  277
Afterword / Michael Ralph  297
References  307
Contributors  333
Index  339

Deborah A. Thomas is R. Jean Brownlee Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation: Sovereignty, Witnessing, Repair, also published by Duke University Press.

Joseph Masco is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago and author of The Future of Fallout, and Other Episodes in Radioactive World-Making, also published by Duke University Press.