2025/12/01 by Shriya Raina · 2 voices
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Comics and Graphic Narratives #Crime and Detective Fiction Studies #Spatial and Cultural Studies
paper · doi:10.16995/cg.17325
openalex publication_date 2025/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/12/03 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
Vanni: A Family’s Struggle through the Sri Lankan Conflict (2019), by Benjamin Dix and Lindsay Pollock, is an ethnographic work in the medium of comics and set in conflict-ridden Sri Lanka. It narrates the story of two fishing families, the Ramachandrans and the Chologars, and their gradual displacement from the coast of Vanni, Sri Lanka, due to the tsunami and the civil war. This essay examines the conflict as a necropolitical project based on the sovereign right to kill and examines how necropolitics conditions death and its related performances. In such cases, sovereignty is constantly asserted and contested through the practice of self-regulation, which, in turn, also influences the performance of intimacy. The essay undertakes the proposed examination by studying the three key aspects of intimacy geopolitics: spatial relations in deathscapes and necroscapes, modes of interaction in the performance of intimacy, and associated sets of practices. Sovereignty is expressed and conditioned in the triadic conversation of necropolitics, intimacy, and death. Intimacy geopolitics allows the framing of impersonal necropolitical conditions with a grounded embeddedness. Comics, as popular geopolitical artifacts, provide a medium in sync with the methodology of intimacy geopolitics.