The Sociopolitical Lives of Dead Bodies: Tibetan Self-Immolation Protest as Mass Media

Makley, Charlene

doi:10.14506/ca30.3.05

Cited by 20 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…The ethical mandate I am examining arises in forms of public speech that seek to reorient the conditions of the speech setting itself or what, following Charlene Makley (, 454), we might term the conditions of “mediated addressivity” (see also Bakhtin ). The actors discussed in this essay are attempting to establish lines of communication that, while neither indifferent to nor satirical of the state's dispensation of politics (cf.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Brotherhood in Dispossession: State Violence and the Ethics of Expectation in Turkey

Tambar

2015

Cult. Anthropol.

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The category of minority has been constitutive of the concept of the people in Turkey, distilling those who do not belong to the history and destiny of the nation from those who do. Minority, in this sense, is not simply a demographic classification, nor merely a matter of legal recognition. It carries the weight of a historical judgment, which scaffolds political community by delineating which populations, languages, and religions remain beyond the framework of collective obligation and responsibility. This essay examines comments delivered by a pro‐Kurdish political party and a largely Kurdish mothers‐of‐the‐disappeared group during Turkey's Gezi Park protests of 2013. These moments of public address participated in the broader spirit of state critique on display during those demonstrations. They were noteworthy, however, for recasting the Gezi events as a late occurrence in a longer history of state violence, prefigured by a century of dispossession experienced by those who have been classed as minorities or threatened with that designation. The essay asks how these invocations of history enabled interventions into imagined futures. The commentaries were not primarily aimed at repudiating the historical judgment of minority as discriminatory or contrary to law, but instead sought to delocalize the judgment vested in the category of minority, to see in that judgment an increasingly generalized economy of state violence, and to view it as prefiguring a political community to come.

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mentioning

confidence: 99%

Brotherhood in Dispossession: State Violence and the Ethics of Expectation in Turkey

Tambar

2015

Cult. Anthropol.

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“…It provides such future life to coloniality at Mohammed's own mortal expense, lending settlement an embodied voice, one that Mohammed can personify through a tale about a gay teenager undeservingly killed by his culture. As such, attunement and perception at visual interfaces can become a form of political survival, and mass media have become a genre to make such claims, as Charlene Makley (2015) has similarly argued about footage of Tibetan self‐immolation. Images harbor the very politics of the future.…”

Section: Meeting Mohammedmentioning

confidence: 99%

Familiar Pixels: Imag(in)ing the Dead and the Political in Israel/Palestine

Silver

2021

American Anthropologist

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On July 2, 2014, a Palestinian teenager, Mohammed Abu Khdeir, was brutally killed. Although his murderers eventually confessed, the month following Mohammed's death was full of indecision about the crime and its perpetrators. During this period, Israeli and Palestinian publics latched onto Mohammed's selfies as intimate touchstones for comprehending who he was, what led to his death, and what subsequent action should be taken. This archive of images, however, inspired different understandings of Mohammed; among Israelis and Palestinians, conflictual voices emerged from the same pictures, making incompatible testimonials about Mohammed's identity and his victimhood. Central to the politics surrounding Mohammed's death were how such personal modes of perception—hearing him, seeing him, sensing him—inspired and legitimated radically different political claims and ambitions. Pausing on the ways that individuals grasped Mohammed in his images, in this article I unravel the cultural genealogies and social affordances that affected Israeli and Palestinian forms of visual apprehension. I argue that the most seemingly mundane moments of individual encounter—when Israelis and Palestinians caught sight of Mohammed at everyday digital interfaces—substantially inflected political landscapes and the contours of social understanding, laying the groundwork for further conflicts, including Israel's 2014 invasion of Gaza that occurred a month after his death. [death and dying, mediation, visuality, sexuality, Israel/Palestine]

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“…Likewise, the human body is acknowledged as a tool in the protest culture. Makley (2015) in his work draws attention to the efficacy of the body, especially in death, advancing the idea that dead bodies are key sites for rethinking politics.…”

Section: Protests and Suicidementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Over the years, numerous publications on self-immolation in the field of social sciences have contributed extensively to the understanding of this concept. The concept has since been marked with studies of various incidences of it, some of which are modeled in similar ways with Thich Quang Duc, conducted in many countries across the world, across continents and across gender lines, amongst other stratification (Ahmadiet et al, 2008;Biggs, 2012;Makley, 2015;Shakya, 2012;Rommet et al, 2008).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Self-Immolation in The Extinction of Menai by Chuma Nwokolo

Nkeokelonye

Kaur

Rani

et al. 2020

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This study explores the concept of self-immolation within the African literary space. It observes how people bear witness to express causes through protests, with their words, action and the self-application of lethal harm. With growing incidences of suicides around the world, self-Immolation remains peculiar generally for its politicization and likening to a sacrifice for a cause, drawing attention to social injustice and giving voice to acts of persecution which could have been voiceless. Although self-Immolation has gained interdisciplinary attention, there is an observable dearth of scholarship in the field of literature. In African literature, writers have adopted suicide as a way of dying for their characters; the much-celebrated work of Chinua Achebe gives credence to this. Studies exploring the underlying aetiology of self-inflicted deaths in novels remain sparse. In this study, we focus on The Extinction of Menai (2018) by Chuma Nwokolo, a contemporary African writer. Using the work of Emile Durkheim on Suicide as an operative framework, we explore incidences of self-inflicted deaths as a protest mechanism. We establish the use of suicide for protests by characters that cut across gender lines. We equally note the underlying cultural melody behind all acts of suicide witnessed in this novel by Chuma Nwokolo.

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The Sociopolitical Lives of Dead Bodies: Tibetan Self-Immolation Protest as Mass Media

Cited by 20 publications

References 4 publications

Brotherhood in Dispossession: State Violence and the Ethics of Expectation in Turkey

Brotherhood in Dispossession: State Violence and the Ethics of Expectation in Turkey

Familiar Pixels: Imag(in)ing the Dead and the Political in Israel/Palestine

Self-Immolation in The Extinction of Menai by Chuma Nwokolo

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