Commissioned Book Review: Kandida Purnell, Rethinking the Body in Global Politics Bodies, Body Politics, and the Body Politic in a Time of Pandemic
| Author | Nupur Pattanaik |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14789299221075918 |
| Published date | 01 May 2023 |
| Date | 01 May 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Commissioned Book Review |
Political Studies Review
2023, Vol. 21(2) NP5 –NP6
journals.sagepub.com/home/psrev
Commissioned Book Review
1075918PSW0010.1177/14789299221075918Political Studies ReviewCommissioned Book Review
book-review2022
Commissioned Book Review
Rethinking the Body in Global Politics
Bodies, Body Politics, and the Body Politic in
a Time of Pandemic by Kandida Purnell. New
York: Routledge, 2021. 180 pp., £33.29 (eBook),
ISBN 9781138337329.
Dr Kandida Purnell is an international politi-
cal sociologist with a teaching experien ce in
English, Scottish and UK Systems, and cur-
rently working as an Assistant Professor in
International Relations at Richmond, The
American International University in London.
Her research into the field of international
relations addresses the local–global body poli-
tics and takes an interdisciplinary, methodo-
logically innovative, feminist and decolonial
approach that draws and builds up the contem-
porary international, social and political theory
by exploring embodiment and society. Kandida
Purnell’s excellent and unique analysis has
been spotted in times of pandemic with situat-
ing body in international relations in these cri-
sis times.
The concept of bodies and embodiment
has been within the discipline of International
relations. Through the historical and factual
perspective, the author describes bodies as per-
formative, lively and ontologically insecure
and always in a path for the process of nation-
building; the book is a noteworthy compilation
of Human bodies and collective bodies politic.
The chapters provide a step-by-step guide
to rethinking the body through the notion
intended to offer to approach global politics
through the lens of bodies, bodies in general
and their precarious, excessive, ontologically
insecure, and emotional facets; body politic
refers the necropolitics defining contemporary
local-global patterns body politics of the
unwell (rather than dead) metaphor ,the body
politic focussing on the performative materiali-
sation of the outdated and unwell human body
at its source through a close study of the diag-
nosis, hospitalisation, and recovery and con-
flicted bodies are the visual-emotional politics
and landscape engendered and embodied
through the spring and summer of 2020’s first
wave of COVID-19, paying attention to social-
political construction of atmospheric walls and
mechanisms, including angles of arrival, the
containment of grief, numbing by numbers,
and the pressuring of particular body parts. The
empirical analysis portrays the contemporary
international relations debates on British and
American Politics and international relations
with broader and interdisciplinary theoretical
literature on bodies and politics.
The first chapter elaborates on the bodies
how they affect feelings, emotions and the role
of necropolitics, bio-politics and visual politics.
Bodies are contested sites of local and global
politics and play a vital role in the international
political system.
Regarding the human body, the author illu-
minates that every-body is a contested site for
local–global politics. In the chapter, there have
been discourses of a body being subjected to
violence, and how gender and racial classifica-
tion makes some bodies more vulnerable to
marginalization.
The second chapter of the book discusses
body politics which refers to the fact that bod-
ies owe political decisions; they are not outside
the political system, but a part of it and a con-
tested unit. In these testing times of pandemic,
bodies were seen determining the law and
order, especially in the parliament, governmen-
tal buildings and international levels.
They revealed various techniques for man-
agement skills such as vaccination strategies to
following pandemic protocols and various safe-
guard techniques required for the smooth func-
tioning of human beings and society in these
crisis times of pandemic.
The third chapter of the book reflects the
body politic in times of coronavirus pandemic,
in the context of international relations where
there was war, peace and direct political vio-
lence; the empirical facts of international rela-
tions highlighted that the bodies being affected
or diminished and being entangled in the
framework of global political structures.
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