The place of the dead, the time of dictatorship

Nostalgia, sovereignty, and the corpse of Ferdinand Marcos

Datos Bibliográficos

ID4476756
AutoresBobby Benedicto (McGill University, autor de correspondencia)
Año2021
Volumen39
Número4
Páginas722-739
Fecha de publicación2021-08-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaEnvironment and Planning D Society and Space (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0263-7758 • E-ISSN: 1472-3433
EditorialSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/02637758211013038
PMID34421166
OpenAlexW3166738867
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas4
Referencias citadas20

In 1993, the body of former Philippine dictator, Ferdinand E Marcos, was moved from Honolulu, Hawaii, where he died in exile, to a private mausoleum attached to his ancestral home in Batac, Ilocos Norte. Preserved and placed in a refrigerated coffin while his wife, Imelda, lobbied for his burial at the Heroes' Cemetery, Marcos's body remained on display until 2016, when permission for his interment was granted by the newly elected president, Rodrigo Duterte. Drawing on fieldwork conducted at the Marcos Mausoleum prior to the controversial burial and at the protests that came in its wake, this essay examines the sense of loss and longing that has animated the rise of authoritarian nostalgia. Banished yet unburied, the dictator's embalmed corpse, I suggest, speaks to what remains unmourned under democracy and which thus always threatens to return-namely, a figure of unfettered freedom and authority, whose power might be said to extend over life, death, and time itself. I argue that it is this figure-the figure of a sovereign gone missing-that authoritarian nostalgia takes as its object and which grows more seductive in light of the hollowing out of popular sovereignty that has come to define the post-revolutionary experience

Archaeology · Art · Art history · Authoritarianism · Coffin · Democracy · Dictator · Dictatorship · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Sociology · Sovereignty · Wife · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History · Law · Water Governance and Infrastructure