Necronationalism

Managing Race, Death and the Nation's Skeletons

Datos Bibliográficos

ID2996643
AutoresShaira Vadasaria (0000-0002-4591-9593, York University, autor de correspondencia)
Año2015
Volumen21
Número2
Páginas117-131
Fecha de publicación2015-03-04
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaSocial Identities (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1350-4630 • E-ISSN: 1363-0296
EditorialInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/13504630.2015.1041014
OpenAlexW1487113999
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas7
Referencias citadas19

This paper examines the construction of the Simon Wiesenthal Center ‘Museum of Tolerance (Jerusalem)’ over Mamilla Cemetery, one of the largest Muslim burial grounds in the region. Tracing the politics of death as exercised through the excavation of the cemetery, I consider how access to settler colonial memory is managed and renewed through the purging of Indigenous corporeality. Inspired by Achille Mbembe's sobering account of necropower, this paper conceptualizes power as a system of domination inscribed through the colonial management of deceased racial subjects and asks how we might understand systems of settler colonial power arranged through dehumanization of the already dead. I contend that the capacity to govern life after death is still firmly rooted in the reach of colonial power, and that by attending to the excavation and erasure of Mamilla Cemetery's deceased Palestinian subjects, we see a particular configuration of sovereignty defined through a calculus of absence. Identifying this practice of settler colonial nation building as ‘necronationalism’, I consider how power over life after death becomes the very terrain through which a nation is imagined

Colonialism · Constitution · Dehumanization · Indigenous · Inscribed figure · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Sovereignty · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology · Gender Studies · History · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Law · Middle East Politics and Society