RETHINKING NECROPOLITICS
This Fall we will explore necropolitics or the politics of the dead. Necropolitics was initially defined by Achille Mbembe as a manifestation of sovereignty wherein "To exercise sovereignty is to exercise control over mortality and to define life as the deployment of manifestations of power." (2003) This can take the form of actual control over biological existence or that of social death, be it via exile or systematic exclusion from opportunity. While not the immediate focus at its inception the issue can be turned to the question of "which lives matter" and which are to be considered excess or surplus. Reinhardt Koselleck provided a different though not unrelated understanding of the "politics of the dead" in his "War Memorials: Identity Formation of the Survivors" and in this light it could be argued that "necropolitics" is a more capacious category: one that applies to all disciplines concerned with the recovery of the past. Extending beyond Koselleck or Mbembe, necropolitics can be seen as a positive means of constituting community through the practice of caring for the dead. Here, burial, festival, memorials, and tradition play key roles. This leads us to issues of memory and memorialization but also back to the question of who and what counts when counting the dead. Over the course of this semester we will attempt to redefine the concept of necropolitics in light of recent work on questions of disposability (people but also things), extinction, fugivity, memory, animism, hauntology, retroactive ancestral construction, and post-mortem agency but also in relation to more traditional disciplinary approaches and issues.
Lectures
All lectures begin at 6 p.m. unless otherwise noted, and are held in the Daniel Family Commons, which is located in the Usdan University Center.
Black Phoenix Rising: Death and Resurrection of Black Lives
09/25/2017
ANTHONY HATCH • Wesleyan
Bodies Visible and Invisible: The necro-politics of the Jewish Cemetery in the Life of Modern Thessaloniki
10/02/2017
THOMAS LAQUEUR • University of California, Berkeley
Urban Marginality and the Ambivalent State in Latin America
10/09/17
JAVIER AUYERO • University of Texas, Austin
Gifts from the dead - Heritage, Historicity, and Receiving the Past
10/16/17
HANS RUIN • Södertörn University
Necropower and the Politics of Black Fugitive Life
10/30/17
AXELLE KARERA • Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Wesleyan
Spectrality, Mestizaje, and the Afterlife of Racial Necropolitics
11/6/17
LAURA GRAPPO • Wesleyan
Messianism in the Age of Animism
11/13/17
ACHILLE MBEMBE • University of Witswatersrand CANCELLED
In Search of the Soviet Way of Death
11/20/17
VICTORIA SMOLKIN • Wesleyan
Commemorating Caesars at the Creation of the Roman Empire
11/27/17
JOHN BERT LOTT • Vassar College
Commemorating Caesars at the Creation of the Roman Empire
11/27/17
JOHN BERT LOTT • Vassar College
Waiting in Necropolitical Times
12/04/17
VICTORIA PITTS-TAYLOR • Wesleyan