(Un)seeing dead refugee bodies: mourning memes, spectropolitics, and the haunting of Europe

Abstract

This essay addresses the user remediation and performative rematerialization of the 2015 photographs of 3-year-old Kurdish-Syrian refugee Alan Kurdi, as well as acts of concealing and deferring access to those images following intense public debate. This article shifts the frame of discussion from moral spectatorship to mediated witnessing and networked mourning in the context of contemporary affective publics. To speak of the memeification of Kurdi’s corpse-image is to underline the way repetition operates as a gesture of both inhabitation and differentiation by users who connect in this way to others and to the issue at hand. The Kurdi images, thus, were not so much observed by a global audience as produced by, and productive of, a massive, dispersed corporeal network. The conceptual figure of spectrality links the mediality and materiality of the dead body-image to contemporary necropolitics that dispossesses subjects, producing the ‘living death’ of the global precariat. If the public sphere is defined by prohibitions on grieving, conflicts regarding who views, mourns, and speaks for which dead bodies, although often ascribed to debased social media mores, tell us more about the political border of human and nonhuman that produces the revenant figure of the refugee haunting inhospitable and neoliberal, but nominally post-racial, Europe.

‘A Baby Is a Baby’: The Asha Protests and the Sociology of Affective Post-Nationalism

“…Indeed, wider cosmopolitan theorisations have emphasised the importance of affective experiences to the emergence of cosmopolitan allegiances, in particular with reference to suffering taking place in other parts of the world. For example, Judith Butler (2004, 2009) conceives of grief and mourning as the basis for a potential cosmopolitan consciousness, because vulnerability to death is the core shared condition of being human (see also McIvor, 2012; Papailias, 2019; Szorenyi, 2018), and Luc Boltanski (1999) roots cosmopolitan concern in the politics of pity, through which ‘spectators’ disrupt the distance between themselves and others by articulating discourses of the suffering other (see also Kyriakidou, 2015). In the remainder of this article I seek to bring this affective lens to bear on the micro-political practice of post-nationalism, to examine the affective conditions which catalyse post-national practices of contesting and resisting nationalist exclusion.…”

“… 4. Although these protests occurred in the context of a family seeking asylum who were very much alive, I refer nonetheless to grievability, in Butler’s terms, to refer to the ways in which the family’s vulnerability was recognised. People seeking asylum are in some studies equated with a ‘living dead’ because a total lack of recognition of their vulnerability means that they are not rendered as human (Papailias, 2019; Stratton, 2011). …”

Visual Regimes of Mobility Photographic Exhibitions on Refugees during the Financial Crisis in Greece

“…Once again, foreign powers were accused of those deaths, and Greek people were seen as saviors of refugee lives. After a photograph of the corpse of Aylan Kurdi, a three‐year‐old child, on a Turkish beach in September 2015 was exhibited, and contestations regarding its overexposure in the media and social media rose up (Papailias 2018), Prokopis Pavlopoulos heard women in Lesbos telling him that if he had not effectively intervened to solve the migration problem, “the grandmas of Lesbos would be holding soulless drowned children’s little bodies” (Lesvos News 2015).…”

From Play to Political Action: Prosumerism on Fanvideo Meme Production

“…The growing relevance of popular culture, associated with engaged fan practices, indicates the pertinence of investigation of this phenomenon by consumer culture theory (CCT), a consumer research field circumscribed in marketing discipline. Specifically, the creation of memes by productive consumers has gained prominence in researches of fan culture (e.g., Papailias, 2018;Shifman, 2012;Wu & Ardley, 2007). In addition, understanding fan action as prosumption (Souza- Leão & Costa, 2018) results in a comprehension of their role under a market productivity logic (Chen, 2011;Collins, 2010).…”