Steppe Immunity - by Christian Sorace (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Immunity has never just been a medical concept. In an age of pandemics and global crises, personal and national immunities have emerged as central political concerns around the world. On the Mongolian steppe, immunity has taken many forms--imperial privilege, socialist collectivization, nationalist enclosure--each one promising to shelter life in sovereign protection. But under sovereignty's shell, immunological crises are felt intensely in Mongolia: climate change transforms steppe ecology while a political economy dependent on mineral extraction hollows out democratic life. Today, national sovereignty is under pressures it cannot control, generating symptoms it cannot contain. The Mongolian people feel as if the future of their country has disappeared. From within this impasse, Steppe Immunity asks what comes after the nation.

Drawing on fieldwork, archival research, and the histories, poetry, and ecologies of the Mongolian steppe, Christian Sorace traces immunity from Chinggisid sovereignty to the present destabilization. Against understandings of immunity as that which protects us from the world, the book reimagines it as a form of life in common--what we have forgotten to call communism. The steppe is not a refuge outside history. It is a constellation of past and future possibilities of new forms of immunity, democracy, and being-in-common.

Review Quotes

"One of the great strengths of this polymathic book is that it defies any easy effort to categorize its domain. A profound critique of sovereignty, capitalism, and the nation-state, this work offers a detailed historical analysis of Mongolia, its deviation from normative communisms, and its potential power to assist any effort to produce a new communist counter-imaginary. The contradictory forms of immunity that seek either to monopolize or distribute protection shore up sovereignty and destroy the possibility of common life. Considered critically, immunity names not only a common condition but the shared task of world building amidst the debris of failed sovereignty and exhausted forms of liberal democracy. This work shows how to read history theoretically and to reformulate theory through concrete and probing historical work. Engaging the living world implies human life inhabiting the planet with organisms, animals, and land both sedimented with history and an implied biopolitics of living in the open. Brilliantly, Sorace makes the case for imagining a new communism through considering those regional practices at a distance from nation-state and sovereignty, afflicted and relational. In this book, communism becomes a way of bringing discarded inheritances to bear on building a future in which sovereignty has lost its own self-protective logics and human creatures can learn to live beyond the incessant need to guard themselves against the planet to which they belong as lives among the living." --Judith Butler, author of What World is This? A Pandemic Phenomenology

"Sorace's kaleidoscopic and elegant book presents Mongolia as both a unique political existence and a paradoxical metaphor for sovereignty without borders. Writing pensively, Sorace demonstrates how Mongolia is entrenched in the political jungle of macho nationalism, communist legacy, environmental disasters, and development struggles, while still advancing a potential steppe project of emancipation." --Pang Laikwan, Chinese University of Hong Kong

About the Author

Christian Sorace is Associate Professor of Global China at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College. He is the author of Shaken Authority: China's Communist Party and the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake (2017).