Necropolitics Covered

54

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

  1. Writing against neocolonial necropolitics: literary responses by Iraqi/Arab writers to the US ‘War on Terror’

    −1 h

    Writing against neocolonial necropolitics: literary responses by Iraqi/Arab writers to the US ‘War on Terror’

    Motyl, K. and Arghavan, M. (2018) ‘Writing against neocolonial necropolitics: literary responses by Iraqi/Arab writers to the US ‘War on Terror’’, European Journal of English Studies, 22(2), pp. 128–141. doi: 10.1080/13825577.2018.1478256. Abstract: This essay demonstrates that texts by Iraqi/Arab writers conceive the US invasion and occupation of Iraq as an assault on both biological and cultural life. It argues that in occupied Iraq, the very act of writing constitutes a performative survival of neocolonial necropolitics. Thus, Philip Metres’ abu ghraib arias employs visual poetry to bear witness to the suffering of Iraqi civilians subjected to torture at Abu Ghraib prison, by rendering visible what was repressed owing to trauma or silenced in the official investigation. Meanwhile, other literary works express distress about the destruction of Iraq’s cultural archive, since the arts have constituted a precious repository of Iraqi self-knowledge and spiritual nourishment throughout the country’s history of foreign domination and political tyranny. Reflecting on the bomb attack on Baghdad’s ‘Street of the Booksellers’ in 2007, poet Dunya Mikhail delivers a powerful invocation of literature’s longevity even after its material manifestations have been erased. Sinan Antoon’s novel The Corpse Washer (2013) highlights the ubiquity of death in post-2003 Iraq and its paralysing effect on the creative faculties as it tells the story of Jawad, an aspiring sculptor who gives up his artistic ambitions to follow in his father’s footsteps as a corpse washer. 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

    2 min
  2. Shared sorrow, shared abundance: Water-waste flows in Palestinian literature

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    Shared sorrow, shared abundance: Water-waste flows in Palestinian literature

    Hall, J. (2015) ‘Shared sorrow, shared abundance: Water-waste flows in Palestinian literature†’, Postcolonial Studies, 18(3), pp. 257–278. doi: 10.1080/13688790.2015.1105124. Abstract: News following the 2014 Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip warned of the possibly catastrophic costs to Palestinians facing a clean water shortage. This article will argue that within the context of the occupation of the Palestinian territories, literary representations of water and waste are bound up in justifications for and resistance to the Israeli state's exercise of necropolitical power. Representing water and, particularly, polluted water is vexed by questions of who is responsible for the management of water and the production of waste versus who is responsible for the inability, often exacerbated by water shortages, to remediate this waste. This article will examine how these questions are answered by one Israeli and three Palestinian contemporary authors: David Grossman, Anton Shammas, Sahar Khalifeh, and Taha Muhammad Ali. 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

    1 min
  3. The biopolitics of needle exchange in the United States

    −2 d

    The biopolitics of needle exchange in the United States

    McLean, K. (2011) ‘The biopolitics of needle exchange in the United States’, Critical Public Health, 21(1), pp. 71–79. doi: 10.1080/09581591003653124. Abstract: Needle exchange began in the United States as a fragmented and illegal practice initiated by actors at the grassroots level; since the late 1980s, needle exchange has achieved increasing yet variable levels of institutional support across the country, receiving official sanction and funding from state and municipal governments. In turn, the practice(s) and discourse(s) of needle exchange have shifted significantly in many locales, becoming the purview of professional administration that advocates needle exchange as a necessary public health measure. This article is interested in the ways in which needle exchange has become implicated in and appropriated by networks of power seeking to discipline and regulate injection drug use. Drawing theoretically on Michel Foucault’s writings concerning biopower and governmentality, it will examine the proliferation of discourses, knowledges, and rules surrounding needle exchange in the United States. At the same time, this article will avoid a characterization of needle exchange that envisions the unilateral control of drug users by governmental power, illuminating instead both its negative and productive effects for drug users. Namely, it will explore how needle exchange creates both subjects of interest and subjects of resistance among drug users – that is to say, the governmentalization of needle exchange and its ‘clients’. 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

    2 min
  4. Missing Migrants and the Politics of Disappearance in Armed Conflicts and Migratory Contexts

    −3 d

    Missing Migrants and the Politics of Disappearance in Armed Conflicts and Migratory Contexts

    Nyberg Sørensen, N. and Huttunen, L. (2022) ‘Missing Migrants and the Politics of Disappearance in Armed Conflicts and Migratory Contexts’, Ethnos, 87(2), pp. 321–337. doi: 10.1080/00141844.2019.1697333. Abstract: In this article we set out to understand the issue of enforced or involuntary disappearance in two seemingly different situations: the missing persons produced by armed conflict and the missing migrants resulting from increasingly rigid migration policies focused on deterrence. Empirical examples from the Guatemalan and Bosnian genocides and from contemporary illegalised migration flows from Guatemala to North America and across the Mediterranean are provided. Special attention is given to differences and continuities in who the affected people and communities are, the politics behind their disappearances, and the use of biometric technologies across the cases presented. Contrary to criticism often voiced in relation to the use of biometric technologies for migration control purposes, forensic techniques are embraced almost unanimously by people searching for relatives who have disappeared in both conflict and migration situations. 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

    1 min
  5. Monsoons and medicine: the biopolitics of crisis and state indifference in Gilgit-Baltistan

    −4 d

    Monsoons and medicine: the biopolitics of crisis and state indifference in Gilgit-Baltistan

    Varley, E. (2019) ‘Monsoons and medicine: the biopolitics of crisis and state indifference in Gilgit-Baltistan’, South Asian History and Culture, 10(1), pp. 78–96. doi: 10.1080/19472498.2019.1576306. Abstract: Through the medium of a hospital ethnography, this paper explores the debilitating impacts of the 2010 monsoon floods on Gilgit-Baltistan’s public health sector, and interrogates how its escalating harms coalesced with long-standing state neglects to generate medical precarity and loss, and spark debate concerning Pakistan’s responsiveness and commitments to this politically marginalized and remote region. In Gilgit Town, the region’s administrative capital, the state’s failure to adequately prepare for and offset the floods’ direct and indirect effects had catastrophic consequences for public sector hospitals, where healthcare providers worked without sufficient resources, treatment options were greatly diminished, and patients experienced significantly higher risks and worsened health outcomes. In providing ethnographic snapshots of the ways that the floods and disaster-related governance gaps shaped service provision at the region’s primary referral hospital, the paper centralizes healthcare providers’ accounts of the inadequacy of Pakistan’s response to the crisis, and their claims that the state’s failure to protect them from the floods’ worst effects was symptomatic of its historic lack of care for Gilgit-Baltistan and its peoples. 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

    2 min
  6. Pura vida for who? Slow violence against Indigenous land defenders in Costa Rica

    −5 d

    Pura vida for who? Slow violence against Indigenous land defenders in Costa Rica

    Sylvester, O. and Clark, A. (2025) ‘Pura vida for who? Slow violence against Indigenous land defenders in Costa Rica’, Local Environment, pp. 1–20. doi: 10.1080/13549839.2025.2596712. Abstract: Land defense research has largely focused on direct violence – visible, immediate acts of aggression – while neglecting slow violence, an insidious form of harm that is gradual, cumulative, and often invisible. In Costa Rica, Indigenous land defenders have faced threats and assassinations, yet global narratives often overlook Costa Rica, in part because slow violence is hard to track and quantify and this violence is often overshadowed by the widespread promotion of the country’s support for human rights. This study examines slow violence against Indigenous land defenders in Costa Rica, arguing that it is both a distinct form of violence and a condition that increases vulnerability to direct attacks. Using qualitative methods, including document analysis and interviews with Indigenous land defenders, we examined how state inaction and structural racism perpetuate harm. Our findings show that only parts of Indigenous territories are officially recognised, and even those face ongoing settler occupation unaddressed by the state. Despite clear national laws and international obligations, the Costa Rican state has failed to protect Indigenous rights to autonomous governance, has ignored contamination and extraction on their lands, and has established biodiversity protection areas on stolen land. We argue that this slow violence sustains the myth of Costa Rican exceptionalism, masking the real threats faced by Indigenous defenders and undermining efforts to safeguard their rights. These findings can be used to confront the underlying systemic racism that perpetuates violent colonial legacies, facilitates direct violence, and limits Indigenous rights and autonomy. 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

    2 min
  7. The climate change metanarrative, state of exception and China's modernisation

    −6 d

    The climate change metanarrative, state of exception and China's modernisation

    McCarthy, G. (2010) ‘The climate change metanarrative, state of exception and China’s modernisation’, Journal of the Indian Ocean Region, 6(2), pp. 252–266. doi: 10.1080/19480881.2010.536675. Abstract: Part one will argue that the climate change discourse has all the hallmarks of a new metanarrative. However, the emergence of this metanarrative was in contradiction to neoliberal theory of the environment. Therefore, in an effort to reconcile the two metanarratives, an economic discourse emerged that conceptualised climate change with the neoliberal market model. The economic merging of climate change and the market discourses proved politically unsustainable, as was evident at the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit. Part two places the contradictions between the climate change-come-neoliberal metanarrative into a global political context, arguing that neoliberalism has so marginalised many developing countries that their sovereignty is in question, with a state of exception always in play. As such, they are highly vulnerable to any global climate change solution imposed by the corporate market on them. Lastly, the paper will argue that China is unique in its response to climate change. It is a rapidly developing state with a unique history of modernisation that places it in a position to use non-market means to address climate change. What limits the Chinese state from doing so is the political instability that this would cause to the Chinese Communist Party's legitimacy built on socialist–capitalist modernisation and by the vested interests tied to economic growth. 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

    2 min
  8. Spiritual Mining: Augustinian Images of Extraction in Colonial Peru

    20 juni

    Spiritual Mining: Augustinian Images of Extraction in Colonial Peru

    Benavides, A. (2022) ‘Spiritual Mining: Augustinian Images of Extraction in Colonial Peru’, The Art Bulletin, 104(4), pp. 46–69. doi: 10.1080/00043079.2022.2070393. Abstract: Prints and paintings that celebrate the conversion of Indigenous peoples to Christianity can be perceived as “spiritual mining” in light of an underlying extractive ethos that structured the colonial enterprise. This article discusses seventeenth-century artworks commissioned by the Augustinian Order in Peru, which equated evangelization with the mining of precious minerals. Analysis of the artworks paired with a close historical reading of the book of Job identifies an agenda that objectifies Indigenous souls as treasure in order to normalize gestational events in global capitalism—the extraction of mineral resources from American lands and exploitation of Indigenous labor. 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

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

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