A powerful analysis of comparative racialization. As a text that painstakingly details the contemporary circumstances by which race attributes value to certain lives while denying it to others, Social Death will be one of those books that we come back to over and over again. -Roderick A. Ferguson,author of The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference Even though this book is just being published, I have been telling people to find Lisa Marie Cacho's work and read it for years. She has a rare ability to illuminate the collisions and erasures of identity, and she powerfully explains how their devastating consequences are the grounds for social order. This is a game-changing book, written in beautiful and lucid prose. -Rachel Buff,University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee ...Cacho is basically right in her assessment of death and devaluation, especially under the slanted promises of liberal democracy and national consciousness...[A] profound way to think about freedom. -, Women' Studies Quarterly Proves itself an eye-opening account of how and why the American polity is dependent upon the permanence of certain groups' criminalization, groups who are thus rendered functionally 'ineligible for personhood.' -American Studies An innovated, dense, and highly intellectual book best suited for graduate students, law students, scholars, and any layperson interested in race, law, philosophy, and politics. -CHOICE