Racial Prescriptions

Jonathan Xavier Inda is Associate Professor of Latina/Latino Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Targeting Immigrants: Government, Technology, and Ethics, editor of Anthropologies of Modernity: Foucault, Governmentality, and Life Politics, and co-editor of The Anthropology of Globalization: A Reader and of Governing Immigration Through Crime: A Reader.

• Chapter 1 Racial Politics of Life; Chapter 2 The Making of BiDil; Chapter 3 Biosocial Citizenship; Chapter 4 Enlightened Geneticization of Race; Chapter 5 Racial Vital Value; Chapter 6 Neoliberalization of Life;

'Racial Prescriptions provides an eloquent and theoretically-engaged account of the story of BiDil, a pharmaceutical that has become an iconic case for scholars of race in science and medicine.' Somatosphere'The first drug approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on a racial basis - despite an absence of scientific evidence to demonstrate its specificity - BiDil provides a unique example of the encounter between minority politics and commercial strategies. This fascinating story is for Jonathan Xavier Inda the pretext for a broader reflection on the rebiologization and capitalization of race, and their significance in the contemporary politics of life.' Didier Fassin, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, USA‘Racial Prescriptions makes a vital contribution to our evolving understanding of the complex ways that prescription drugs have come to encapsulate societal tensions about race and racisms. Inda elegantly unpacks how race has been biologized through the making of pharmaceuticals, and the implications of this biologization for us all. Racial Prescriptions also tells a broader story about the racial politics of life - and about the ways that "racial" health disparities represent both illnesses that affect racialized minorities, and national autobiographies about our bodies, our value judgements, and ourselves. This is vital reading indeed.’ Jonathan Metzl, Vanderbilt University, USA