“Roses that Grew from Concrete”: Racialized Biopolitics in Angie Thomas’ Fictions

Abstract

Angie Thomas (1988-) is a contemporary African American woman writer noted for her activist identity and her examination of Black experience (particularly young adults experience) within the Black community. She has won the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award, the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize, and the ALA’s William C. Morris Debut Award. Thomas is the author of 3 novels, including The Hate U Give (2017), On the Come Up (2019) and Concrete Rose (2021). The three novels all involve the literary descriptions of physical discipline, power repression, and institutional manipulation experienced by African American young adults in the process of growing up, and profoundly touch upon social problems such as police brutality, systematic poverty and discourse penetration in the United States. The writing about black experience reveals that racial violence is still rampant in American society.

Based on Foucault, Agamben, and Mbembe’s theories of biopolitics, this paper takes Angie Thomas’s three fictions as research object, explores how biopower continues to govern and manipulate blacks in the economic, political and ideological levels via more varied means, which, to different degrees, leads to the mechanism of inclusive exclusion that reduces blacks into the killable homo sacer. The paper further points out that the three novels demonstrate that when the black population is included in the macro governance of biopower, blacks could be utilized as the target of a society of enmity, suppressed or eliminated by the authorities as a threat to the security mechanism, and their bodies can also be commoditized as a resource for exploitation in America’s racial economy. Meanwhile, the sovereign also uses ideological discourse to erase the humanity of African Americans in the media, education and other fields, making it more reasonable to oppress and manipulate blacks.