Rachel Nelson
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- May 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780197266748
- eISBN:
- 9780191938146
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197266748.003.0011
- Subject:
- Art, Art History
This chapter focuses on the different tactics Emily Jacir uses in her varied art practice to trouble narratives of the Palestinian occupation. It tracks through notable artworks including Where We ...
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This chapter focuses on the different tactics Emily Jacir uses in her varied art practice to trouble narratives of the Palestinian occupation. It tracks through notable artworks including Where We Come From (2001–03), Sexy Semite (2002), and ex libris (2010–12), and attempts by Jacir to reveal the discursive frameworks which normalise the atrocities in Palestine. Thinking with scholars including Achille Mbembe and Judith Butler, this chapter traces the strategies the artist uses to communicate the conflict outside of these discursive traps that continually interpret and produce the oppressive reality in Palestine. And, it follows Jacir in asking, what would it take to remake (transform) the sensibility of the conflict in Palestine?Less
This chapter focuses on the different tactics Emily Jacir uses in her varied art practice to trouble narratives of the Palestinian occupation. It tracks through notable artworks including Where We Come From (2001–03), Sexy Semite (2002), and ex libris (2010–12), and attempts by Jacir to reveal the discursive frameworks which normalise the atrocities in Palestine. Thinking with scholars including Achille Mbembe and Judith Butler, this chapter traces the strategies the artist uses to communicate the conflict outside of these discursive traps that continually interpret and produce the oppressive reality in Palestine. And, it follows Jacir in asking, what would it take to remake (transform) the sensibility of the conflict in Palestine?
David Nugent
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- January 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781503609037
- eISBN:
- 9781503609723
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9781503609037.001.0001
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Latin American Cultural Anthropology
What is the state? How is it implicated in the reproduction of relations of domination? Theorists from Marx to Weber, from Durkheim to Gramsci, from Abrams to Foucault have pondered these questions. ...
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What is the state? How is it implicated in the reproduction of relations of domination? Theorists from Marx to Weber, from Durkheim to Gramsci, from Abrams to Foucault have pondered these questions. In The Encrypted State, anthropologist David Nugent sheds new light on these questions by focusing on disorder and delusion, rather than order and rationality. Nugent analyzes mid-century Peru, where the government experienced a crisis of rule. Officials believed that their efforts to govern were being systematically thwarted by an underground political party called APRA that remained largely invisible to the naked eye. APRA’s ability to disrupt official processes of rule produced deep paranoia among officials. They concluded that the party had established a vast subterranean polity of remarkable power and potency, to which virtually everyone secretly belonged. This episode of paranoia and delusion is especially puzzling because immediately prior everyday administration had been entirely normal and routine. In seeking to understand how irrationality and disorder could emerge out of rationality and order, Nugent finds that government projects had always been delusional. During periods of apparent order and rationality, however, officials had disguised their delusion—from themselves and others—by employing a series of bureaucratic and documentary mechanisms. The Encrypted State identifies these mechanisms and shows how they operated. The book also explores when these mechanisms succeeded in creating a facade of order and rationality and when they failed. In the process, the volume advances a radically new way of thinking about the state.Less
What is the state? How is it implicated in the reproduction of relations of domination? Theorists from Marx to Weber, from Durkheim to Gramsci, from Abrams to Foucault have pondered these questions. In The Encrypted State, anthropologist David Nugent sheds new light on these questions by focusing on disorder and delusion, rather than order and rationality. Nugent analyzes mid-century Peru, where the government experienced a crisis of rule. Officials believed that their efforts to govern were being systematically thwarted by an underground political party called APRA that remained largely invisible to the naked eye. APRA’s ability to disrupt official processes of rule produced deep paranoia among officials. They concluded that the party had established a vast subterranean polity of remarkable power and potency, to which virtually everyone secretly belonged. This episode of paranoia and delusion is especially puzzling because immediately prior everyday administration had been entirely normal and routine. In seeking to understand how irrationality and disorder could emerge out of rationality and order, Nugent finds that government projects had always been delusional. During periods of apparent order and rationality, however, officials had disguised their delusion—from themselves and others—by employing a series of bureaucratic and documentary mechanisms. The Encrypted State identifies these mechanisms and shows how they operated. The book also explores when these mechanisms succeeded in creating a facade of order and rationality and when they failed. In the process, the volume advances a radically new way of thinking about the state.
Élisabeth Anstett and Jean-Marc Dreyfus (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781526107381
- eISBN:
- 9781526120694
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781526107381.001.0001
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Social and Cultural Anthropology
This book addresses the practices, treatment and commemoration of victims’ remains in post-genocide and mass violence contexts. Whether reburied, concealed, stored, abandoned or publically displayed, ...
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This book addresses the practices, treatment and commemoration of victims’ remains in post-genocide and mass violence contexts. Whether reburied, concealed, stored, abandoned or publically displayed, human remains raise a vast number of questions regarding their legal, ethical and social uses.
Human Remains in Society will raise these issues by examining when, how and why bodies are hidden or exhibited. Using case studies from multiple continents, each chapter will interrogate their effect on human remains, either desired or unintended, on various political, cultural or religious practices. How, for instance, do issues of confiscation, concealment or the destruction of bodies and body parts in mass crime impact on transitional processes, commemoration or judicial procedures?Less
This book addresses the practices, treatment and commemoration of victims’ remains in post-genocide and mass violence contexts. Whether reburied, concealed, stored, abandoned or publically displayed, human remains raise a vast number of questions regarding their legal, ethical and social uses.
Human Remains in Society will raise these issues by examining when, how and why bodies are hidden or exhibited. Using case studies from multiple continents, each chapter will interrogate their effect on human remains, either desired or unintended, on various political, cultural or religious practices. How, for instance, do issues of confiscation, concealment or the destruction of bodies and body parts in mass crime impact on transitional processes, commemoration or judicial procedures?
Tung-Hui Hu
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780262029513
- eISBN:
- 9780262330091
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- The MIT Press
- DOI:
- 10.7551/mitpress/9780262029513.003.0004
- Subject:
- Computer Science, Programming Languages
This chapter examines the ways that companies, users, and states alike navigate the overload of data in the cloud by targeting information, and argues that targeted-marketing campaigns online come ...
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This chapter examines the ways that companies, users, and states alike navigate the overload of data in the cloud by targeting information, and argues that targeted-marketing campaigns online come out of the same ideological apparatus as military targeting. Two oppositional groups serve as case studies for this argument: first, a group of radio-frequency hackers that data mined the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya, and second, the artist/geographer Trevor Paglen, who photographs U.S. reconnaissance satellites and other covert military infrastructures. As this chapter argues, these oppositional tactics may be effective, but sometimes re-animate the very structures of power that they purport to expose or overturn. The reason is due to something this chapter terms the sovereignty of data, which both co-opts user participation and also gives practices such as torture and extraordinary rendition new life within the cloud.Less
This chapter examines the ways that companies, users, and states alike navigate the overload of data in the cloud by targeting information, and argues that targeted-marketing campaigns online come out of the same ideological apparatus as military targeting. Two oppositional groups serve as case studies for this argument: first, a group of radio-frequency hackers that data mined the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya, and second, the artist/geographer Trevor Paglen, who photographs U.S. reconnaissance satellites and other covert military infrastructures. As this chapter argues, these oppositional tactics may be effective, but sometimes re-animate the very structures of power that they purport to expose or overturn. The reason is due to something this chapter terms the sovereignty of data, which both co-opts user participation and also gives practices such as torture and extraordinary rendition new life within the cloud.
Raminder Kaur
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- July 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780199498710
- eISBN:
- 9780199099986
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780199498710.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Indian History
The book tells the many stories that circulate around a nuclear power plant in Kudankulam in the southern peninsular region of Tamil Nadu in India from the late 1980s. The tales are by way of ...
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The book tells the many stories that circulate around a nuclear power plant in Kudankulam in the southern peninsular region of Tamil Nadu in India from the late 1980s. The tales are by way of fishermen and women, farmers, environmentalists, activists, writers, scholars, teachers, journalists, priests, children, as much as they are of lawyers, scientists, state officials and the author drawing upon an interdisciplinary field as the subject compels. They show how peninsular residents contended with the prospect of one of Asia’s largest nuclear enterprise being built on their doorstep. They reveal what role the nuclear plant plays in contested discourses of development, democracy, and nationalism in multiple spaces of criticality. Based on over a decade of historical and ethnographic research, we learn about the anti-nuclear campaign’s part in ‘right-to-lives’ movements, the (re)production of knowledge and ignorance in the understanding of radiation, and tactics to create an evidence base in response to the otherwise unavailable or inaccessible data on radiation and public health in India. In the process, the author casts a lens on how national and transnational solidarity was both received and curtailed, where processes of neo-liberalization and national security led to the hardening of the ‘nuclear state’. This phenomenon came with the direct and indirect repression of the anti-nuclear movement with the engineering of ‘death conditions’ for its protagonists. Altogether, this is one of the few books that has at its heart the many facets of a grassroots movement for energy justice in the global south from the 1980s that, three decades on, went on to become an international cause célèbre.Less
The book tells the many stories that circulate around a nuclear power plant in Kudankulam in the southern peninsular region of Tamil Nadu in India from the late 1980s. The tales are by way of fishermen and women, farmers, environmentalists, activists, writers, scholars, teachers, journalists, priests, children, as much as they are of lawyers, scientists, state officials and the author drawing upon an interdisciplinary field as the subject compels. They show how peninsular residents contended with the prospect of one of Asia’s largest nuclear enterprise being built on their doorstep. They reveal what role the nuclear plant plays in contested discourses of development, democracy, and nationalism in multiple spaces of criticality. Based on over a decade of historical and ethnographic research, we learn about the anti-nuclear campaign’s part in ‘right-to-lives’ movements, the (re)production of knowledge and ignorance in the understanding of radiation, and tactics to create an evidence base in response to the otherwise unavailable or inaccessible data on radiation and public health in India. In the process, the author casts a lens on how national and transnational solidarity was both received and curtailed, where processes of neo-liberalization and national security led to the hardening of the ‘nuclear state’. This phenomenon came with the direct and indirect repression of the anti-nuclear movement with the engineering of ‘death conditions’ for its protagonists. Altogether, this is one of the few books that has at its heart the many facets of a grassroots movement for energy justice in the global south from the 1980s that, three decades on, went on to become an international cause célèbre.
Banu Bargu (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781474450263
- eISBN:
- 9781474476539
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474450263.001.0001
- Subject:
- Political Science, International Relations and Politics
Turkey’s democratic regime and its vicissitudes are dependent on a necropolitical undercurrent. This book presents a bold collection of essays that evaluate Turkey’s recent history from the ...
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Turkey’s democratic regime and its vicissitudes are dependent on a necropolitical undercurrent. This book presents a bold collection of essays that evaluate Turkey’s recent history from the perspective of the necropolitical underpinnings of its precarious democracy. Combining cutting edge research and a diverse range of approaches from multiple disciplines, including political theory, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, history, international relations, and gender and sexuality studies, the book examines the multiple ways in which lives are brought into the fold of power and analyses how they are subjected to mechanisms of death and destruction, as well as modalities of infrastructural violence, strategic neglect and exposure. Focusing on themes such as martyrdom, counterinsurgency warfare, enforced disappearances and conscientious objection; sites such as emergency zones, cemeteries, monuments and borderlands; and institutions such as prisons, courts and the army, the collection offers a sobering and original analysis of contemporary Turkey and, thus indirectly, of the changing political dynamics of the Middle East. It points to the emergence of new forms of impoverishment, inequality and disposability. It provides a new and rich lexicon that makes a sophisticated contribution to the growing research program on violence in the critical humanities.Less
Turkey’s democratic regime and its vicissitudes are dependent on a necropolitical undercurrent. This book presents a bold collection of essays that evaluate Turkey’s recent history from the perspective of the necropolitical underpinnings of its precarious democracy. Combining cutting edge research and a diverse range of approaches from multiple disciplines, including political theory, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, history, international relations, and gender and sexuality studies, the book examines the multiple ways in which lives are brought into the fold of power and analyses how they are subjected to mechanisms of death and destruction, as well as modalities of infrastructural violence, strategic neglect and exposure. Focusing on themes such as martyrdom, counterinsurgency warfare, enforced disappearances and conscientious objection; sites such as emergency zones, cemeteries, monuments and borderlands; and institutions such as prisons, courts and the army, the collection offers a sobering and original analysis of contemporary Turkey and, thus indirectly, of the changing political dynamics of the Middle East. It points to the emergence of new forms of impoverishment, inequality and disposability. It provides a new and rich lexicon that makes a sophisticated contribution to the growing research program on violence in the critical humanities.
Ian Finseth
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780190848347
- eISBN:
- 9780190848378
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190848347.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature
Tracing the Civil War dead’s representational afterlife acroᶊ an array of historical, visual, and literary documents from 1861 to 1914, this book shows that they played a central, complex, and ...
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Tracing the Civil War dead’s representational afterlife acroᶊ an array of historical, visual, and literary documents from 1861 to 1914, this book shows that they played a central, complex, and paradoxical role in how Americans understood the “modernity” of the United States. Amid the turbulence of the postbellum era, the dead provided an illusion of coherence, intelligibility, and continuity in the national self, and yet they also focalized American society’s central philosophical and moral conflicts. Recirculated through the networks of information and meaning by which a culture understands and creates itself, they functioned, and continue to function, as a form of symbolic currency in a memorial economy linking the Civil War era to the present. Reconstructing the strategies by which postwar American society reimagined the Civil War dead, this book argues that a strain of critical thought was alert to this necropolitical dynamic from the very years of the war itself.Less
Tracing the Civil War dead’s representational afterlife acroᶊ an array of historical, visual, and literary documents from 1861 to 1914, this book shows that they played a central, complex, and paradoxical role in how Americans understood the “modernity” of the United States. Amid the turbulence of the postbellum era, the dead provided an illusion of coherence, intelligibility, and continuity in the national self, and yet they also focalized American society’s central philosophical and moral conflicts. Recirculated through the networks of information and meaning by which a culture understands and creates itself, they functioned, and continue to function, as a form of symbolic currency in a memorial economy linking the Civil War era to the present. Reconstructing the strategies by which postwar American society reimagined the Civil War dead, this book argues that a strain of critical thought was alert to this necropolitical dynamic from the very years of the war itself.
Anstett Élisabeth and Dreyfus Jean-Marc (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- January 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780719096020
- eISBN:
- 9781781707876
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719096020.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, World Modern History
Destruction and human remains investigates a crucial question frequently neglected from academic debate in the fields of mass violence and Genocide Studies: what is done to the bodies of the victims ...
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Destruction and human remains investigates a crucial question frequently neglected from academic debate in the fields of mass violence and Genocide Studies: what is done to the bodies of the victims after they are killed? Indeed, in the context of mass violence and genocide, death does not constitute the end of the executors' work. Following the abuses carried out by the latter, their victims' remains are treated and manipulated in very particular ways, amounting in some cases to social engineering. The book explores this phase of destruction, whether by disposal, concealment or complete annihilation of the body, across a range of extreme situations to display the intentions and socio-political framework of governments, perpetrators and bystanders. The book will be split into three sections; 1) Who were the perpetrators and why were they chosen? It will be explored whether a division of labour created social hierarchies or criminal careers, or whether in some cases this division existed at all. 2) How did the perpetrators kill and dispose of the bodies? What techniques and technologies were employed, and how does this differ between contrasting and evolving circumstances? 3) Why did the perpetrators implement such methods and what does this say about their motivations and ideologies? The book will focus in particular on the twentieth century, displaying innovative and interdisciplinary approaches and dealing with case studies from different geographical areas across the globe. The focus will be placed on a re-evaluation of the motivations, the ideological frameworks and the technical processes displayed in the destruction of bodies.Less
Destruction and human remains investigates a crucial question frequently neglected from academic debate in the fields of mass violence and Genocide Studies: what is done to the bodies of the victims after they are killed? Indeed, in the context of mass violence and genocide, death does not constitute the end of the executors' work. Following the abuses carried out by the latter, their victims' remains are treated and manipulated in very particular ways, amounting in some cases to social engineering. The book explores this phase of destruction, whether by disposal, concealment or complete annihilation of the body, across a range of extreme situations to display the intentions and socio-political framework of governments, perpetrators and bystanders. The book will be split into three sections; 1) Who were the perpetrators and why were they chosen? It will be explored whether a division of labour created social hierarchies or criminal careers, or whether in some cases this division existed at all. 2) How did the perpetrators kill and dispose of the bodies? What techniques and technologies were employed, and how does this differ between contrasting and evolving circumstances? 3) Why did the perpetrators implement such methods and what does this say about their motivations and ideologies? The book will focus in particular on the twentieth century, displaying innovative and interdisciplinary approaches and dealing with case studies from different geographical areas across the globe. The focus will be placed on a re-evaluation of the motivations, the ideological frameworks and the technical processes displayed in the destruction of bodies.
Lucy Bollington and Paul Merchant (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781683401490
- eISBN:
- 9781683402169
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9781683401490.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Latin American Studies
Latin American Culture and the Limits of the Human curates an important series of case studies of the posthuman imaginaries and nonhuman tropes employed in a broad range of Latin American cultural ...
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Latin American Culture and the Limits of the Human curates an important series of case studies of the posthuman imaginaries and nonhuman tropes employed in a broad range of Latin American cultural texts, from the narratives of Las Casas to new media and installation art in contemporary Mexico, Colombia, and Argentina. The book’s introduction highlights the ways the figure of the “limit” has functioned as an important site of aesthetic, ontological, and political experimentation and reworking in Latin American cultural production, and underlines the potentialities and possible risks associated with the use of posthuman frameworks in the region. The different chapters examine the ways human borders and boundaries have been tested, undermined, and reformulated in relation to issues including dictatorial violence and drug war necropolitics, ecological storytelling, indigenous thought systems, gender, race, history, and new materialism. The book as a whole marshals a wide range of theoretical frameworks and points to the complex ways Latin American culture intersects with and departs from global formulations of humanism and the posthuman.Less
Latin American Culture and the Limits of the Human curates an important series of case studies of the posthuman imaginaries and nonhuman tropes employed in a broad range of Latin American cultural texts, from the narratives of Las Casas to new media and installation art in contemporary Mexico, Colombia, and Argentina. The book’s introduction highlights the ways the figure of the “limit” has functioned as an important site of aesthetic, ontological, and political experimentation and reworking in Latin American cultural production, and underlines the potentialities and possible risks associated with the use of posthuman frameworks in the region. The different chapters examine the ways human borders and boundaries have been tested, undermined, and reformulated in relation to issues including dictatorial violence and drug war necropolitics, ecological storytelling, indigenous thought systems, gender, race, history, and new materialism. The book as a whole marshals a wide range of theoretical frameworks and points to the complex ways Latin American culture intersects with and departs from global formulations of humanism and the posthuman.
Daniel Y. Kim
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- May 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781479800797
- eISBN:
- 9781479800018
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479800797.003.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
This introduction establishes the historiographical and methodological orientation to the Korean War adopted by The Intimacies of Conflict, which works against the erasure of this event in US ...
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This introduction establishes the historiographical and methodological orientation to the Korean War adopted by The Intimacies of Conflict, which works against the erasure of this event in US cultural memory in two ways. First of all, it returns us to cultural works from the 1950s: films and journalistic representations that used the conflict to stage a number of compelling dramas of interracial and transnational intimacy. Such texts articulate two cultural logics central to US Cold War liberalism and military multiculturalism: “military Orientalism,” which frames Japanese American soldiers and other Asian combatants as loyal allies, and “humanitarian Orientalism,” which constructs Korean civilians as worthy objects of humanitarian care. Both logics, however, legitimate any Asian deaths that occur in the course of the fighting, revealing the particular biopolitical and necropolitical formations that emerged during the Korean War. Second, this study looks to a body of recent novels on the conflict authored primarily by US writers of color. These offer trenchant critiques of the forms of intimacy privileged by midcentury Cold War ideologies and constitute an exemplary assemblage of cultural memory that highlights the intimacies of the multiple histories of race and empire that converged in the conflict.Less
This introduction establishes the historiographical and methodological orientation to the Korean War adopted by The Intimacies of Conflict, which works against the erasure of this event in US cultural memory in two ways. First of all, it returns us to cultural works from the 1950s: films and journalistic representations that used the conflict to stage a number of compelling dramas of interracial and transnational intimacy. Such texts articulate two cultural logics central to US Cold War liberalism and military multiculturalism: “military Orientalism,” which frames Japanese American soldiers and other Asian combatants as loyal allies, and “humanitarian Orientalism,” which constructs Korean civilians as worthy objects of humanitarian care. Both logics, however, legitimate any Asian deaths that occur in the course of the fighting, revealing the particular biopolitical and necropolitical formations that emerged during the Korean War. Second, this study looks to a body of recent novels on the conflict authored primarily by US writers of color. These offer trenchant critiques of the forms of intimacy privileged by midcentury Cold War ideologies and constitute an exemplary assemblage of cultural memory that highlights the intimacies of the multiple histories of race and empire that converged in the conflict.
Daniel Y. Kim
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- May 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781479800797
- eISBN:
- 9781479800018
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479800797.003.0005
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
This chapter focuses on how civilians—particularly refugees and orphans—were depicted in US cinematic and journalistic representations of the Korean War. While revelations by a team of Associated ...
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This chapter focuses on how civilians—particularly refugees and orphans—were depicted in US cinematic and journalistic representations of the Korean War. While revelations by a team of Associated Press reporters in 1999 of a massacre of Korean civilians by US soldiers near No Gun Ri in late 1950 shocked the American public, the fact that such actions, essentially war crimes, were committed by their nation’s military men was openly acknowledged in cultural works from the Korean War era. This chapter looks to accounts of “the refugee problem” in Life magazine, which explained that US soldiers were now firing on civilians because Communists were routinely infiltrating their ranks. It also takes up two Hollywood films—One Minute to Zero (1952) and Battle Hymn (1959)—in which such killings feature prominently. These works exemplify the humanitarian Orientalism that took shape during the Korean War, which purported to make surgical distinctions between populations that required killing and ones that were worthy objects of humanitarian care. These works render such deaths, however, as a tragic and necessary outcome and endow them with an aura of religious sacrifice, giving divine sanction to the deathworlds created by the necropolitical and biopolitical machinery of US war-making.Less
This chapter focuses on how civilians—particularly refugees and orphans—were depicted in US cinematic and journalistic representations of the Korean War. While revelations by a team of Associated Press reporters in 1999 of a massacre of Korean civilians by US soldiers near No Gun Ri in late 1950 shocked the American public, the fact that such actions, essentially war crimes, were committed by their nation’s military men was openly acknowledged in cultural works from the Korean War era. This chapter looks to accounts of “the refugee problem” in Life magazine, which explained that US soldiers were now firing on civilians because Communists were routinely infiltrating their ranks. It also takes up two Hollywood films—One Minute to Zero (1952) and Battle Hymn (1959)—in which such killings feature prominently. These works exemplify the humanitarian Orientalism that took shape during the Korean War, which purported to make surgical distinctions between populations that required killing and ones that were worthy objects of humanitarian care. These works render such deaths, however, as a tragic and necessary outcome and endow them with an aura of religious sacrifice, giving divine sanction to the deathworlds created by the necropolitical and biopolitical machinery of US war-making.
Adrián Félix
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- December 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780190879365
- eISBN:
- 9780190932084
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190879365.001.0001
- Subject:
- Political Science, American Politics, Political Theory
In the context of research on the “thickening” of borders, Specters of Belonging raises the related question: How does transnational citizenship thicken across the political life cycle of Mexican ...
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In the context of research on the “thickening” of borders, Specters of Belonging raises the related question: How does transnational citizenship thicken across the political life cycle of Mexican migrants? In addressing this question, this book resembles what any good migration corrido (ballad) does—narrate the thickening of transnational citizenship from beginning, middle, to end. Specifically, Specters of Belonging traces Mexican migrant transnationalism across the migrant political life cycle, beginning with the “political baptism” (i.e., naturalization in the United States) and ending with repatriation to México after death. In doing so, the book illustrates how Mexican migrants enunciate, enact, and embody transnational citizenship in constant dialectical contestation with the state and institutions of citizenship on both sides of the U.S.-México border. Drawing on political ethnographies of citizenship classrooms, the first chapter examines how Mexican migrants enunciate transnational citizenship as they navigate the naturalization process in the United States and grapple with the contradictions of U.S. citizenship and its script of singular political loyalty. The middle chapter deploys transnational ethnography to analyze how Mexican migrants enact transnational citizenship within the clientelistic orbit of the Mexican state, focusing on a group of returned migrant politicians and transnational activists. Last, the final chapter turns to how Mexican migrants embody transnational citizenship by tracing the cross-border practice of repatriating the bodies of deceased Mexican migrants from the United States to their communities of origin in rural México.Less
In the context of research on the “thickening” of borders, Specters of Belonging raises the related question: How does transnational citizenship thicken across the political life cycle of Mexican migrants? In addressing this question, this book resembles what any good migration corrido (ballad) does—narrate the thickening of transnational citizenship from beginning, middle, to end. Specifically, Specters of Belonging traces Mexican migrant transnationalism across the migrant political life cycle, beginning with the “political baptism” (i.e., naturalization in the United States) and ending with repatriation to México after death. In doing so, the book illustrates how Mexican migrants enunciate, enact, and embody transnational citizenship in constant dialectical contestation with the state and institutions of citizenship on both sides of the U.S.-México border. Drawing on political ethnographies of citizenship classrooms, the first chapter examines how Mexican migrants enunciate transnational citizenship as they navigate the naturalization process in the United States and grapple with the contradictions of U.S. citizenship and its script of singular political loyalty. The middle chapter deploys transnational ethnography to analyze how Mexican migrants enact transnational citizenship within the clientelistic orbit of the Mexican state, focusing on a group of returned migrant politicians and transnational activists. Last, the final chapter turns to how Mexican migrants embody transnational citizenship by tracing the cross-border practice of repatriating the bodies of deceased Mexican migrants from the United States to their communities of origin in rural México.
Anya Bernstein
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780226072555
- eISBN:
- 9780226072692
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226072692.003.0004
- Subject:
- Religion, Buddhism
This chapter shifts the focus back to contemporary Buryatia, taking a close look at the strategies used to re-consecrate postsocialist Buddhist landscape and the production of new sacred geographies, ...
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This chapter shifts the focus back to contemporary Buryatia, taking a close look at the strategies used to re-consecrate postsocialist Buddhist landscape and the production of new sacred geographies, historiographies, and cosmologies of time and space. While proposing to look at these phenomena in the context of the widely known Tibetan phenomenon of “treasures”— objects found underground that are accorded a revelatory status— the chapter expands the understanding of “treasures” through highlighting the special role of dead bodies as quintessential objects of the post-Soviet treasure hunt. It looks at the necropolitics that have developed around the bodies of two lamas: Itigelov who died in the 1920s and on whose “miraculously incorruptible” body, unearthed in 2003, the autonomy of Buryat Buddhism is said to currently rest; and Sodooi-Lama, at whose burial site, a new “self-arisen” image of the goddess Yanzhima had recently been discovered. Through making claims that these bodies and objects associated with them intentionally manifested themselves in these troubled postsocialist times, Buryat Buddhists create a renovated cosmology that overwrites their otherwise seemingly peripheral location in the Mongol-Tibetan world.Less
This chapter shifts the focus back to contemporary Buryatia, taking a close look at the strategies used to re-consecrate postsocialist Buddhist landscape and the production of new sacred geographies, historiographies, and cosmologies of time and space. While proposing to look at these phenomena in the context of the widely known Tibetan phenomenon of “treasures”— objects found underground that are accorded a revelatory status— the chapter expands the understanding of “treasures” through highlighting the special role of dead bodies as quintessential objects of the post-Soviet treasure hunt. It looks at the necropolitics that have developed around the bodies of two lamas: Itigelov who died in the 1920s and on whose “miraculously incorruptible” body, unearthed in 2003, the autonomy of Buryat Buddhism is said to currently rest; and Sodooi-Lama, at whose burial site, a new “self-arisen” image of the goddess Yanzhima had recently been discovered. Through making claims that these bodies and objects associated with them intentionally manifested themselves in these troubled postsocialist times, Buryat Buddhists create a renovated cosmology that overwrites their otherwise seemingly peripheral location in the Mongol-Tibetan world.
Carol Mason
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780813175324
- eISBN:
- 9780813175676
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Kentucky
- DOI:
- 10.5810/kentucky/9780813175324.003.0008
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
This chapter examines the depiction of masculinity in two early twenty-first-century representations of Appalachia: the short-lived reality show Buckwild and Rebecca Scott’s Removing Mountains: ...
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This chapter examines the depiction of masculinity in two early twenty-first-century representations of Appalachia: the short-lived reality show Buckwild and Rebecca Scott’s Removing Mountains: Extracting Nature and Identity in the Appalachian Coalfields. Both texts offer portraits of men contending with their vanishing ways of life. The author analyzes these representations as depictions that shape ideas of manhood and proposes necropolitics as a framework for theorizing coal war fields of a globalized economy. The chapter thereby takes “place” as a matrix of meanings that includes racialized, classed, and gendered politics of space, and the social identities emerging from those configured areas.Less
This chapter examines the depiction of masculinity in two early twenty-first-century representations of Appalachia: the short-lived reality show Buckwild and Rebecca Scott’s Removing Mountains: Extracting Nature and Identity in the Appalachian Coalfields. Both texts offer portraits of men contending with their vanishing ways of life. The author analyzes these representations as depictions that shape ideas of manhood and proposes necropolitics as a framework for theorizing coal war fields of a globalized economy. The chapter thereby takes “place” as a matrix of meanings that includes racialized, classed, and gendered politics of space, and the social identities emerging from those configured areas.
David Nugent
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- January 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781503609037
- eISBN:
- 9781503609723
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9781503609037.003.0002
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Latin American Cultural Anthropology
This chapter introduces concepts that are crucial to the analysis of The Encrypted State. The most important of these is “sacropolitics,” the politics of public mass sacrifice. This term identifies a ...
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This chapter introduces concepts that are crucial to the analysis of The Encrypted State. The most important of these is “sacropolitics,” the politics of public mass sacrifice. This term identifies a form of sovereignty that is distinct from biopolitics, necropolitics and the state of exception. Sacropolitics differs from biopolitics in the sense that it is not about the management of life. It differs from necropolitics in that it is not about the subjugation of life to death. Sacropolitics is neither about managing nor taking life but rather animating it. It is about bringing to life dead, dying or moribund populations and social formations. Sacropolitical efforts call upon the entire population to engage in public performances of mass sacrifice. These performances are intended to contribute to the creation of new life worlds that can redeem poor countries from the profane state into which they have fallen.Less
This chapter introduces concepts that are crucial to the analysis of The Encrypted State. The most important of these is “sacropolitics,” the politics of public mass sacrifice. This term identifies a form of sovereignty that is distinct from biopolitics, necropolitics and the state of exception. Sacropolitics differs from biopolitics in the sense that it is not about the management of life. It differs from necropolitics in that it is not about the subjugation of life to death. Sacropolitics is neither about managing nor taking life but rather animating it. It is about bringing to life dead, dying or moribund populations and social formations. Sacropolitical efforts call upon the entire population to engage in public performances of mass sacrifice. These performances are intended to contribute to the creation of new life worlds that can redeem poor countries from the profane state into which they have fallen.
David Nugent
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- January 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781503609037
- eISBN:
- 9781503609723
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9781503609037.003.0010
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Latin American Cultural Anthropology
The Conclusion draws out the implications of the analysis for theories of sovereignty and state formation. The focus is on state ritual, bureaucratic and documentary practices that produce the ...
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The Conclusion draws out the implications of the analysis for theories of sovereignty and state formation. The focus is on state ritual, bureaucratic and documentary practices that produce the illusion of ordinary, mundane rule, the mechanisms by which the delusional nature of state activity is rendered unremarkable, and the processes that undermine the effectiveness of these mechanisms. Central to the analysis is the notion of sacropolitics, a form of sovereignty that is based not on the management of life (biopolitics) or on the subjugation of life to death (necropolitics) but rather on the animation of life. Sacropolitics seeks to bring to life dead, dying or moribund social formations. It calls upon the entire population to engage in public performances of mass sacrifice, which are intended to help create new life worlds that can redeem poor countries from the profane state into which they have fallen.Less
The Conclusion draws out the implications of the analysis for theories of sovereignty and state formation. The focus is on state ritual, bureaucratic and documentary practices that produce the illusion of ordinary, mundane rule, the mechanisms by which the delusional nature of state activity is rendered unremarkable, and the processes that undermine the effectiveness of these mechanisms. Central to the analysis is the notion of sacropolitics, a form of sovereignty that is based not on the management of life (biopolitics) or on the subjugation of life to death (necropolitics) but rather on the animation of life. Sacropolitics seeks to bring to life dead, dying or moribund social formations. It calls upon the entire population to engage in public performances of mass sacrifice, which are intended to help create new life worlds that can redeem poor countries from the profane state into which they have fallen.
Élisabeth Anstett and Jean-Marc Dreyfus
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781526107381
- eISBN:
- 9781526120694
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781526107381.003.0001
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Social and Cultural Anthropology
The introduction outlines the book’s scope and addresses the central questions raised by the included chapters: when, how and why are bodies hidden or exhibited, and what is their effect, either ...
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The introduction outlines the book’s scope and addresses the central questions raised by the included chapters: when, how and why are bodies hidden or exhibited, and what is their effect, either desired or unintended, on various political, cultural or religious practices? With explicit reference to each chapter, a historic and disciplinary background will be presented, raising issues such as the increased application of forensic sciences on the discovered dead body, the emergence of debates surrounding necro-political strategies by states and political communities, and the economy and chain of custody over human remains resulting from historic and contemporary forms of violence.Less
The introduction outlines the book’s scope and addresses the central questions raised by the included chapters: when, how and why are bodies hidden or exhibited, and what is their effect, either desired or unintended, on various political, cultural or religious practices? With explicit reference to each chapter, a historic and disciplinary background will be presented, raising issues such as the increased application of forensic sciences on the discovered dead body, the emergence of debates surrounding necro-political strategies by states and political communities, and the economy and chain of custody over human remains resulting from historic and contemporary forms of violence.
Gina K. Velasco
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- May 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780252043475
- eISBN:
- 9780252052354
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5622/illinois/9780252043475.003.0006
- Subject:
- Sociology, Gender and Sexuality
Beginning with a discussion of the mainstream US news coverage of the 2016 mass shooting at a Latinx party at Pulse (an LGBT nightclub in Orlando, Florida), this chapter connects Puerto Rico to the ...
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Beginning with a discussion of the mainstream US news coverage of the 2016 mass shooting at a Latinx party at Pulse (an LGBT nightclub in Orlando, Florida), this chapter connects Puerto Rico to the Philippines through Allan Isaac’s notion of “American tropics.” US empire is intimately tied to trans and queer necropolitics, exemplified by the 2014 murder of Jennifer Laude (a Filipina trans woman) by Joseph Scott Pemberton, a white US Marine. However, queer and trans analyses are often elided within anti-imperialist scholarship and social movements. Inversely, a critique of empire is often missing from mainstream US queer and trans politics. Ultimately, this chapter calls for an integration of anti-imperialist politics with queer and trans social movements, especially within Filipina/o American diasporic nationalismsLess
Beginning with a discussion of the mainstream US news coverage of the 2016 mass shooting at a Latinx party at Pulse (an LGBT nightclub in Orlando, Florida), this chapter connects Puerto Rico to the Philippines through Allan Isaac’s notion of “American tropics.” US empire is intimately tied to trans and queer necropolitics, exemplified by the 2014 murder of Jennifer Laude (a Filipina trans woman) by Joseph Scott Pemberton, a white US Marine. However, queer and trans analyses are often elided within anti-imperialist scholarship and social movements. Inversely, a critique of empire is often missing from mainstream US queer and trans politics. Ultimately, this chapter calls for an integration of anti-imperialist politics with queer and trans social movements, especially within Filipina/o American diasporic nationalisms
Banu Bargu
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781474450263
- eISBN:
- 9781474476539
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474450263.003.0001
- Subject:
- Political Science, International Relations and Politics
The uncertainty concerning Turkey’s democratic future depends not only on authoritarian tendencies of majoritarian rule and the momentous consequences of the failed coup but also on the presence and ...
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The uncertainty concerning Turkey’s democratic future depends not only on authoritarian tendencies of majoritarian rule and the momentous consequences of the failed coup but also on the presence and intensification of a longstanding necropolitical undercurrent of Turkey’s political constitution. This necropolitical undercurrent expresses the imbrication of Turkey’s democracy with violence. This chapter offers the theoretical groundwork of the volume, mapping the problematic of necropolitics that informs the contributions in the book. It presents Turkey as a political laboratory in which necropolitics must be understood in the plural and where various modalities of necropolitics are in the making.Less
The uncertainty concerning Turkey’s democratic future depends not only on authoritarian tendencies of majoritarian rule and the momentous consequences of the failed coup but also on the presence and intensification of a longstanding necropolitical undercurrent of Turkey’s political constitution. This necropolitical undercurrent expresses the imbrication of Turkey’s democracy with violence. This chapter offers the theoretical groundwork of the volume, mapping the problematic of necropolitics that informs the contributions in the book. It presents Turkey as a political laboratory in which necropolitics must be understood in the plural and where various modalities of necropolitics are in the making.
Lerna K. Yanık and Fulya Hisarlıoğlu
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781474450263
- eISBN:
- 9781474476539
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474450263.003.0003
- Subject:
- Political Science, International Relations and Politics
In this piece, through an alternative reading of biopolitics and merging the literature on necropolitics with critical geography, we develop the concepts necrogepolitics and necropolitical spaces. We ...
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In this piece, through an alternative reading of biopolitics and merging the literature on necropolitics with critical geography, we develop the concepts necrogepolitics and necropolitical spaces. We argue that the Turkish sovereign has very little difficulty in making death and self-sacrifice a desired behaviour by spatialising necropolitical power domestically and internationally. Necrogeopolitics emerges as a discursive practice that conditions the subject to die for the geopolitical and security interests of the sovereign, necropolitical spaces, on the other hand, are both material and discursive spaces that aim at the same goal at the domestic level. Both spaces condition the subjects for the idea that death is the appropriate behaviour if/when the state is under attack. This modification of social behaviour is engineered by the Turkish state in a very subtle, silent, and everyday manner. We discuss these instances of intervention through the necrogeopolitisation of Turkey’s territorial self, as well as the specific necrospatial changes that took place in the aftermath of the 15 July 2016 coup attempt.Less
In this piece, through an alternative reading of biopolitics and merging the literature on necropolitics with critical geography, we develop the concepts necrogepolitics and necropolitical spaces. We argue that the Turkish sovereign has very little difficulty in making death and self-sacrifice a desired behaviour by spatialising necropolitical power domestically and internationally. Necrogeopolitics emerges as a discursive practice that conditions the subject to die for the geopolitical and security interests of the sovereign, necropolitical spaces, on the other hand, are both material and discursive spaces that aim at the same goal at the domestic level. Both spaces condition the subjects for the idea that death is the appropriate behaviour if/when the state is under attack. This modification of social behaviour is engineered by the Turkish state in a very subtle, silent, and everyday manner. We discuss these instances of intervention through the necrogeopolitisation of Turkey’s territorial self, as well as the specific necrospatial changes that took place in the aftermath of the 15 July 2016 coup attempt.
