Body Politics 1
Channel: Utsab Chatterjee
Date: 2020-06-08

Utsab Chatterjee, Body Politics, Politics, Citizenship, Act, Political artwork
This video art brings the meaning of citizenship into dialogue with recent work on the body and with practices of contemporary (political) slavery. In bringing the concepts of citizenship, ownership, bodies and slavery into collision, it highlights the need to couple slavery with possibilities of citizenship as an alternative to the way in which citizenship and slavery are mutually exclusive: one can be either a citizen or a slave, not both. Recent ideas about the body as a site for politics, where the body is understood in terms of embodied relationality in a situation – a necessarily social category – are a means for bringing about a richer encounter between the concepts of citizenship understood as political subjectivity, bodies and slavery. Practices of slavery deny relationality, based instead on a binary master/slave logic of power relations. This work conceptually connects citizenship with slavery, by identifying citizenship as embodied political subjectivity and slavery as one of the conditions in which the very possibility of this is denied; it also engages with the dialogue between citizenship, the body as a site for politics and practices of contemporary slavery with the extreme juxtaposition of alienation, confusion and hierarchy. Taking embodied relationally into account, recognizing the necessarily social embodiment of concepts and abjuring an abstract, disembodied sphere of concepts, thus disrupts the standard understanding of slavery as rights violations.If embodiment is to be understood as a situation, with the social and political written into it, it means that recognition of relational embodiment accompanies the acknowledgement of political subjectivity, given the social construction of the idea of political subjectivity, and as the ongoing struggle for “socially recognized personhood”. This move provides a stronger basis upon which the actions of slaves to resist and protest against their treatment can be recognized as acts of political subjects, for relational embodiment allows no distinction, no fragmentation of persons into disposable bodies and human subjects. This video art does not put an end to slavery, but instead provide a stronger basis for an appreciation of its ongoing contestation in multiple fields.