Those who were disappeared into the arcana of the state, whose bodies were never properly buried, whose deaths were never truly grieved, they continue to haunt Turkey’s politics. In speaking of them, Ege Selin Islekel speaks for a republic’s suppressed conscience. With exemplary clarity, rigor, and passion, Islekel theorizes the colonial workings of a nightmarish power formation that grows by wielding loss and the resistances that emerge in the afterlives of absent death and improper burial. This is a superb example of critical theory from the Global South, one that stirs the mind and the heart at once."—Banu Bargu, University of California, Santa Cruz "Based on a detailed study of practices of improper burial in Turkey and Latin America, Selin Islekel develops the concept of necrosovereignty as a distinct technology of power that emerges in the peripheries of the modern-colonial world system and operates by disallowing death. This haunting and hopeful book deftly elucidates the epistemic and spatial methods of necrosovereignty and identifies practices of epistemic-political resistance that refuse its enforced disappearances." —Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson, Syracuse University
Offering a political epistemology of collective mourning
Focusing on forms of improper burial in Turkey and Latin America, Ege Selin Islekel argues that a political technology of mourning is fundamental to contemporary politics. This technology of necrosovereignty shapes not only individuals’ and populations’ lives but also their epistemic and political afterlives. Local practices of mourning, however, contain resistant capacities, opening alternative ways of knowing, remembering, and assembling. “Nightmare knowledges,” Islekel posits, are resistant modes of knowing tied up with grief that challenge the contemporary politics of death and those politics’ archival boundaries. Seen in mothers’ movements across the globe, from the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo of Argentina to the Saturday Mothers of Turkey, nightmare knowledges produce counterarchives that mobilize traditionally ignored epistemic categories.
Nightmare Remains forges a new dialogue between post-Foucauldian political theory and decolonial thought and brings a fresh critical perspective to the theoretical discourse of enforced disappearances.
Prelude
Introduction
Part One: Necrosovereignty
Chapter One: Absent Death
Chapter Two: Disappearing Grief
Chapter 3: Building Anew
Interlude
Part Two: Nightmare Knowledges
Chapter Four: The Epistemology of Loss
Chapter Five: Stories of Nothing
Chapter Six: Fables that Stir the Mind
Coda
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Produktdetaljer
Biographical note
EGE SELIN ISLEKEL is an assistant professor of philosophy at Texas A&M University. She is the coeditor of The Biopolitics of Punishment: Derrida and Foucault (Northwestern University Press).