Discussant: Laura Kunreuther (Bard College)
University Seminar in Modern Greek
From the ongoing delays surrounding the construction of the country’s first crematorium, to the 2008 uprising sparked by the fatal police shooting of teenager Alexis Grigoropoulos, from ‘viral’ national and diasporic mourning on social media platforms and at ad hoc on-site collective memorials for the tragic deaths of celebrities or previously unknown accident victims, to the routinized acceptance of the daily body count of anonymous refugees washed up on the nation’s coastlines, the circumstances under which dead bodies are produced and differentially handled, viewed, disposed and grieved is undeniably at the center of contemporary Greek personal and political life, even if this fact is rarely acknowledged as such. The related cultural debates, political struggles and technological innovations, linked to the emergence of physical and online deathscapes and memorial sites, are constitutive and transformative of conceptions of citizenship, biopolitics, national and religious identities, kinship and relationality, and gender and sexual difference. This paper provides an overview of some of the key theoretical concepts guiding my ongoing research into this topic with emphasis on the technopolitical (mediated witnessing, social media memorializing, affective networks, mourning memes, database aesthetics, etc.) The emphasis on the materiality and mediality of the corpse, combined with a fundamental concern for the necropolitics of exclusion, discrimination and violence that leads to premature, painful and humiliating death, inaugurates a field of “spectropolitics” that has the potential to conjoin anthropology and new media studies in a rigorous and mutually transformative manner.