2020/03/19 by Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Nadera Shalhoub‐Kevorkian · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #Geographies of human-animal interactions #Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies #Torture, Ethics, and Law
paper · doi:10.1080/1070289x.2020.1737403
crossref issued 2020/03/19 · crossref published 2020/03/19 · crossref published-online 2020/03/19 · openalex publication_date 2020/03/19 · crossref created 2020/03/19 · crossref published-print 2020/05/03 · crossref deposited 2021/05/06 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · crossref indexed 2026/07/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/25
In theorising penal politics, this article investigates the marking of the colonised through an analysis of state violence over dead bodies. Delving into and describing the political scene in which the state – through its courts, law, military, and police – leaves dead bodies bleeding after death, withholds them in carceral refrigerators, and tortures their communities, uncovers what I define as necropenology. Developed from the voices of Jerusalemite families whose children were imprisoned after death, this paper argues that expanding spaces of carcerality, criminalising those who are already dead, and penetrating Palestinian spaces of mourning, illustrates new modes of penology, a necropenology. Necropenology conquers new bodies, psychics, and territories in life and in death through the performance of power that marks both dead and living bodies as disposable. Jerusalemite families articulate first-hand how this form of power strips control of one’s own emotions, inscribes indignities, and keeps the colonised as dangerous entities, always on trial in death and when dead.