The Other Kidney: Biopolitics Beyond Recognition

This article links ethnographic exploration of commodified renal transactions in India to their articulation in Hindi film as practices re-animating kinship in the face of the death or diminishment of the father. To think through the work such organ stories do, I contrast the `transplant film' with the `transfusion film'. I argue transfusion narratives offer a liberal developmentalist recoding of social relations under the sign of a Nehruvian project of national recognition, while transplant narratives abandon the project of development for an imaginated return to tradition. To understand the stakes in this shift, I trace the genealogy of modern transplant medicine through the relationship between recognition and suppression and through the return of the surgical as a metonym for care.