Nightmare Remains

"Those who were disappeared into the arcana of the state, whose bodies were never properly buried, whose deaths were never truly grieved, they continue to haunt Turkey’s politics. In speaking of them, Ege Selin Islekel speaks for a republic’s suppressed conscience. With exemplary clarity, rigor, and passion, Islekel theorizes the colonial workings of a nightmarish power formation that grows by wielding loss and the resistances that emerge in the afterlives of absent death and improper burial. This is a superb example of critical theory from the Global South, one that stirs the mind and the heart at once."—Banu Bargu, University of California, Santa Cruz "Based on a detailed study of practices of improper burial in Turkey and Latin America, Selin Islekel develops the concept of necrosovereignty as a distinct technology of power that emerges in the peripheries of the modern-colonial world system and operates by disallowing death. This haunting and hopeful book deftly elucidates the epistemic and spatial methods of necrosovereignty and identifies practices of epistemic-political resistance that refuse its enforced disappearances." —Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson, Syracuse University