The Suicidal State - Race Suicide, Biopower, and the Sexuality of Population

The Suicidal State theorizes a biopolitics of suicide by mapping the entwinement between the Progressive-Era discourse of -race suicide- and period representations of literary suicide. Against the backdrop of the turn-of-the-century debates over immigration restrictions, -race suicide- suggests white Americans' low birth rate as foretelling an immanent extinction of the white race, prefiguring the contemporary white nationalist discourse, -replacement theory.- While race suicide personified the populational subject--the -race---as a suicidal individual, Progressive-Era literature gave birth to a microgenre of literary suicides, including works by Henry James, Kate Chopin, Jack London, Gertrude Stein, and a series of Madame Butterfly texts. The Suicidal State argues that suicides in these texts literalize the fear of race suicide as they thwart the biopolitical demands for self-preservation, survival, and reproduction, articulating queer deathways that betray the nation's reproductive i