Necropolitics Covered

54

Covering abstracts and excerpts of academic pieces on necropolitics from all over the world. necropolitics.substack.com

  1. 1 dag geleden

    Grief Activism and Solidarity with Migrants Along the EU’s Eastern Migratory Route

    Kekstaite, J. and Vukotić, V. (2025) ‘Grief Activism and Solidarity with Migrants Along the EU’s Eastern Migratory Route’, Geopolitics, pp. 1–25. doi: 10.1080/14650045.2025.2562293. Abstract: The EU’s external border restricts the movement of unwanted individuals and subjects them to necropolitical governance. Such governance is sustained by epistemic and affective borders, determining whose lives and deaths are deemed meaningful. Maurice Stierl has proposed the concept of ‘grief activism’ as a form of transformative politics that can subvert such borders. In this paper, we further develop this framework in the specific context of Eastern EUrope, using Lithuania as a case in point. This research explores how the Lithuanian grassroots initiative Sienos Grupė (English: Border Group) engages with the lives and deaths of illegalised migrants and their relatives, invisibilised by the border regime. While research on grief activism has tended to focus on commemorations of migrant deaths, we argue that its scope should be expanded to engage with the entire ‘live-death continuum’ – including the ongoing erosion of conditions for a liveable life in an unequal world. This broader framing provides tools to situate violence against migrants historically and relationally, while seeking to foster alternative directions of affect and political engagement. Drawing on engaged ethnographic fieldwork (2022–2024), semi-structured interviews with members of Sienos Grupė, and an analysis of the group’s public communication, we examine how activists seek recognition for those excluded from dominant regimes of grievability. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com

    Grief Activism and Solidarity with Migrants Along the EU’s Eastern Migratory Route
  2. 3 dgn geleden

    Producing Elite Indigenous Masculinities

    Hokowhitu, B. (2012) ‘Producing Elite Indigenous Masculinities’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2(2), pp. 23–48. doi: 10.1080/2201473X.2012.10648840. Excerpt: This article asserts that elite indigenous tribal masculinity is a particular type of masculinity that has developed since colonisation, in part at least, mimicking dominant forms of invader/settler masculinity. While most commentators have outlined that the dominant forms of invader/settler masculinities were held to be inversely related to the mind of indigenous men, the productive nature of power imposed a different set of rules that challenged this dialectic so that aspects of invader/settler masculinity were necessarily imbibed into burgeoning post-contact indigenous masculine leaders. This masculinity has since been allocated disciplinary and authoritative power through notions of tradition and authenticity. Further, indigenous masculinity was often asserted as reflecting the collective will for liberation; in reality, elite indigenous masculinities have habitually served to exclude alternative forms of indigenous masculinity and indigenous women from leadership roles. Via a post-hegemonic analysis of indigenous masculinity, this article appraises the Janus-faced and ambivalent figure of the indigenous heterosexual patriarch; both oppressor and oppressed. The dialectics between hetero-patriarchal masculinity and feminism, and colonised/coloniser become complicated, as indigenous masculinities are both imbibed with privilege and denied it; both performing colonial hetero-patriarchy and resistant to it. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com

    Producing Elite Indigenous Masculinities
  3. 5 dgn geleden

    Ya Falastin: Networks of Resistance Against the Economy of Genocide

    Kočović De Santo, M. (2026) ‘Ya Falastin: Networks of Resistance Against the Economy of Genocide’, Capitalism Nature Socialism, 37(1), pp. 108–132. doi: 10.1080/10455752.2025.2607978. Abstract: This work offers a radical ecological reading of Palestine as a more-than-human subject. What pedagogies emerge when we listen to olive roots, children's voices, poets addressing land as sentient witness? Using the Tree of Life and Death as a methodological metaphor, I trace how pluriversal relational pedagogies form counter-metabolism against capitalism's parasitic logic. The Tree framework structures analysis: roots hold pre-monotheistic ontologies where earth and body remain inseparable; branches express steadfastness, care, and reciprocity; mycorrhizal networks sustain life while sharing soil with Armillaria – capitalism feeding on death. I map three necro-economic patterns: epistemicide (killing the word “genocide”), economy of genocide ($225 billion through arms/tech/finance), and ecocide (one million olive trees as temporal annihilation). Palestinian voices persist as epistemologies. When poets address “Ya Falastin,” land becomes a listening subject – trees witness, roots remember, soil responds – these are not testimonies but theory. Counter-hegemonic processes that allow the forest of life to survive depend on unlearning growth ideology and cultivating global solidarities rooted in collective refusal. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com

    Ya Falastin: Networks of Resistance Against the Economy of Genocide
  4. 18 jul

    Where Do Animals Go When They Disappear? The animal spectre as a more-than-human epistemology in performance

    Masini, T. (2024) ‘Where Do Animals Go When They Disappear? The animal spectre as a more-than-human epistemology in performance’, Performance Research, 29(7), pp. 100–109. doi: 10.1080/13528165.2024.2569240. Abstract: This essay addresses the disappearance of non-domesticated animals as both material beings and spectral figures within contemporary aesthetic, ecological and political imaginaries. Through a posthumanist lens, I argue that animals rarely ‘leave' the scene of human representation; rather, they return as phantasmatic presences whose absence signals a form of haunting. Drawing on Critical Animal Studies and performance epistemologies, I interpret the vanishing animal not as a mere lack, but as a generative fault line that disrupts human-centered understandings of presence, visibility and embodiment. In this sense, disappearance becomes a performative event in which nonhuman life continues to act through ghostly remainders and traces. The text situates this spectrality within the broader context of animal exploitation, environmental crisis and the anthropocentric imaginary, suggesting that the disappearance of animals coincides with their transformation into symbols or commodities. Yet these spectral animals also carry the potential to destabilize anthropocentric epistemologies by interrupting the smooth functioning of representation. The essay explores this disruption as a form of 'bug': a generative error that exposes the fragility of human mastery, and renders visible the limits of anthropocentric systems of meaning-making. By treating the spectral animal as an active participant in performance and cultural production, I propose a rethinking of disappearance not as final erasure, but as a mode of critical thinking. Ultimately, the essay argues that the spectral animal forces us to inhabit a temporal and ethical space in which disappearance and survival are no longer opposites but intertwined processes. The haunting returns of animal life invite a different kind of perception: one that is attuned to the possibility that something continues to speak and resonate even when it is no longer materially present. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com

    Where Do Animals Go When They Disappear? The animal spectre as a more-than-human epistemology in performance
  5. 16 jul

    Senegalese immigrant families’ ‘regroupement’ in France and the im/possibility of reconstituting family across multiple temporalities and spatialities

    Lo, M. S. (2015) ‘Senegalese immigrant families’ ‘regroupement’ in France and the im/possibility of reconstituting family across multiple temporalities and spatialities’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 38(15), pp. 2672–2687. doi: 10.1080/01419870.2015.1042894. Abstract: This paper interrogates the structural conditions, macropolitics and governmentality of family ‘regroupement’ in France in an era of shifting immigration policies in Europe and the imaginative possibilities that Senegalese immigrants exercise to maintain family and kinship ties with those left behind. It argues that while the need to maintain ties from diasporic locations is mediated by policies, material and emotive transnational practices, the materiality of displacement as well as the state's politics of immigration render more elusive possibilities of maintaining family in situ. What tensions and creative strategies emerge? How is ‘home’, the primordial site of family structure, reimagined and reconstituted? Taking into account state's politics and immigrants’ entrapment within multiple spheres of power and their active agency as determinants, this paper uncovers how displacement gives rise to multiple ruptures while simultaneously motivating a search for active agency to reconstruct and reimagine kinship, family and conjugality across multiple temporalities and spatialities. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com

    Senegalese immigrant families’ ‘regroupement’ in France and the im/possibility of reconstituting family across multiple temporalities and spatialities
  6. 14 jul

    Black Mediterranean hauntings: border violence, burial, and anti-racist care work in Strange Fish

    Paynter, E. (2025) ‘Black Mediterranean hauntings: border violence, burial, and anti-racist care work in Strange Fish’, Cultural Studies, 39(6), pp. 887–911. doi: 10.1080/09502386.2025.2538523. Abstract: This article explores forms of haunting that shape lives and livelihoods in the Mediterranean, recognising the sea as a site of movement, labour, and death. The Mediterranean is now widely understood as a kind of deathscape, as people on the move from former European colonies risk and lose their lives en route to Europe. Yet the production of migrant death – its materiality and simultaneous spectacle and invisibility – is not simply a consequence of harsh border policies. Here, I trace how migrant death in the Mediterranean is a crucial part of the racialized mechanisms that maintain a precarious labour force within Europe and transform livelihoods across Mediterranean shores. Engaging the Black Mediterranean as a site of haunting, I centre the relationship between haunting and care in a reading of the 2018 documentary Strange Fish (dir. Giulia Bertoluzzi), which describes how the production of death in the Central Mediterranean has transformed the labour of fishermen in Zarzis, Tunisia, who have been rescuing migrants and burying the dead since the early 2000s. Writing as an ‘implicated subject’ (Rothberg) who has spent extended time in Italy with people who have survived the sea crossing, I read the film both in terms of the unfolding history it documents, as well as through the visual and sonic elements it employs to illustrate these entangled forms of care and labour. In solidarity with people on the move, I argue that, as necropolitical border regimes threaten to upend notions of the refugee and related issues of rights and justice, it is crucial to understand and engage death at sea not strictly as a migration issue, but as a quotidian reality entangled in questions of labour and social justice on all shores of the Mediterranean. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com

    Black Mediterranean hauntings: border violence, burial, and anti-racist care work in Strange Fish
  7. 12 jul

    The cannibal wave: the cultural logic of Spain's temporality of crisis (revolution, biopolitics, hunger and memory)

    Abstract: This article analyses how hunger and guillotines, revolution and food, butchers and protests are connected in the Spanish collective imaginary during the current temporality of crisis (2008–2013), with the aim of establishing its cultural grammar. By examining different representations of the crisis by means of gastronomy – including examples of graffiti and slogans, cooking TV shows and horror movies – I will describe the existing tensions between practices of resistance and collective imaginations of violent political change. I will propose that the social circulation of food and food images is a decisive contributing factor in the symbolic landscape of the crisis, shaping divided political economies according to the role of the citizens, the state or the corporations in control and the management of the collective access to nutritional goods. Pig slaughter versus the supermarket of the gods: two political universes offer their opposing poetic poles. On one side we will find (i) the subaltern logic of the popular distribution of proteins acquired, thanks to a founding act of communal violence (the slaughter of the pig). On the other side we recognize (ii) disciplinary, hegemonic logics based on the masking of biopolitical links between nutrition, economy and society (the supermarket of gods). Citation: Méndez, G. L. (2014) ‘The cannibal wave: the cultural logic of Spain’s temporality of crisis (revolution, biopolitics, hunger and memory)’, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 15(1–2), pp. 241–271. doi: 10.1080/14636204.2014.935013. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com

    The cannibal wave: the cultural logic of Spain's temporality of crisis (revolution, biopolitics, hunger and memory)

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Covering abstracts and excerpts of academic pieces on necropolitics from all over the world. necropolitics.substack.com