Somatic States: On Cartography, Geobodies, Bodily Integrity

In Somatic States, Franck Billé examines the conceptual link between the nation-state and the body, particularly the visceral and affective attachment to the state and the symbolic significance of its borders. Billé argues that corporeal analogies to the nation-state are not simply poetic or allegorical but reflect a genuine association of the individual body with the national outline-an identification greatly facilitated by the emergence of the national map. Billé charts the evolution of cartographic practices and the role that political maps have played in transforming notions of territorial sovereignty. He shows how states routinely and effectively mobilize corporeal narratives, such as framing territorial loss through metaphors of dismemberment and mutilation. Despite the current complexity of geopolitics and neoliberalism, Billé demonstrates that corporeality and bodily metaphors remain viscerally powerful because they offer a seemingly simple way to apprehend the abstract nature of the nation-state.

Franck Billé is Program Director of the Tang Center for Silk Road Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is editor of Voluminous States: Sovereignty, Materiality, and the Territorial Imagination, also published by Duke University Press, and author of Sinophobia: Anxiety, Violence, and the Making of Mongolian Identity.