“Whoever Dies, Dies”: A Pedagogical Model forUnderstanding the COVID-19 Outbreak in United States Prisons

A year into the COVID-19 pandemic, nearly half of the United States prison population, or five times the rate found in the general population, had been infected. Limited social distancing and difficult to implement preventative measures helped to spread COVID-19 in prisons, while many incarcerated individuals felt that government policy prevented their ability to self-care. These feelings of alienation reflect a history of policy that links disease to deviance and social death. Based on the written self-reflections of anthropology students in Wisconsin prisons, this article outlines an ethnographic and pedagogical model for analyzing pandemic policy. Students learned to relate anthropological terminology to their critiques of policy and revealed how prisoners adapted to feelings of invisibility and hopelessness during a pandemic.

DATA NECROPOLITICS v2

Algorithmic Governmentality’ (A. Rouvroy), ‘Expository society’ (B. Harcourt), ‘Black Box Society’ (F. Pasquale), ‘Surveillance Capitalism’ (S. Zuboff), ‘Techno-Feudalism’ (C. Durand), ‘Radical Anti-Humanism (E. Sadin), increasing literature has been highlighting how our societies and subjectivities are being modified and threatened by new technologies and Big Techs . While these debates are grasping how our social existence and future are being shaped by the development of novel technologies, guided by profit rentability and power struggles, I would like to suggest another critical layer. The current deployment of new technologies also relies on a novel circulation of violence. Borrowing the expression from Achille Mbembe I call this phenomenon Data Necropolitics, which is also the title of the book I am working on. Necropolitics is ‘the generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies and populations.’ My intuition is that Data Necropolitics is at the intersection of these two phenomena. Data and new technologies are reifying human’s lives, through different procedures of ‘mortification of the self’ labour exploitation , and in some cases, and especially among vulnerable populations, they can foster violence and eventually death. Violence should not be understood as ‘mere’ physical aggression or violation of private property rights. It is also socio-economic and symbolic. When I refer to Data Necropolitics, I have in mind not only the physical elimination of given individuals, but also a predatory/digital form of governance that expose and produce social violence, vulnerability and eventually (social) death. It circulates below and set the foundations of our technological ‘welfare’.

Baudelaire's Creole Gothic : A Postcolonial Afterlife for Les Fleurs du mal

Baudelaire’s verse poetry is informed by a pervasive Creole Gothic resonance. Two separate but related topoi, the Undead and the Living Dead, lie at the heart of the collection’s necrological imaginary of slave and zombie labour. It is this Gothic double-trope of death-in-life/life-in-death that activates the Gothic Creole strain running through Les Fleurs du mal. Ironically, those poems that seem to evoke most directly the Creole world that Baudelaire encountered in 1841, firstly in Mauritius and then in Réunion, avoid all evocation of plantation slavery. Conversely, the city poems associate modern metropolitan life with the idea of slavery, representing it as a living death and death as a merely temporary and reversible escape. The collection’s representation of this ‘living death’ foreshadows the construction (by Orlando Patterson, most notably) of transatlantic chattel slavery as ‘social death’. As for the poetic representation of the ‘Undead’, this centres on the figure of the zombie. The zombie is essentially a slave for whom death has proved no guarantee against an endless ‘living death’ of hard labour. If the Creole inflection of Baudelaire’s imagery relates primarily to the realities of industrialized plantation labour and to the chattel slavery on which it was based, it is further reinforced by indices of tropical localisation and of racial difference, more specifically pigmentation. However subliminal its resonance, this Creole Gothic strain guarantees for Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal a vivid postcolonial afterlife.

Case Studies in Social Death: The Criminalization and Dehumanization of Six Black and Latino Boys

To fully grasp the systems of oppression youth of color must navigate, educators must consider their experiences outside as well as inside the classroom. This paper adds to the small but growing body of literature across fields highlighting how Black and Latinx youth are simultaneously positioned by schools and the justice system as criminals that must be contained and removed from school and society. This paper argues that the concept of social death, which refers to social suffering as a result of criminalization and dehumanization, helps contextualize the process by which carceral oppression manifests in students’ lives. Based on an interview study with thirty adults who were first incarcerated as adolescents, this paper focuses on three Black and three Latino male participants’ experiences with social death in schools and their neighborhoods.

Culinary Nostalgia and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: Addenda to Kinga Király's Az újrakezdés receptjei (2019) / Recipes for a New Beginning (2020)

Kinga Király conducted interviews with ten North Transylvanian survivors who represent the last witnesses of a generation that is about to disappear and leave us with the question of what to remember and how. On reading the testimonies catalogued in the volume Király produced from those interviews, I realized that I felt compelled to make further connections with my own research on foodways and war trauma and on the ecologies of survival witnessing. In a section on the mass genocide of Transylvanian Jewry I provide a brief historical sketch to help the understanding of the historical complexity and tragedy of the lives of pre- and postwar Transylvanian Jewry. I then contrast the stories of some of Király's subjects with the postwar memoirs of other Transylvanian survivors who emigrated either right after the war or under the Ceausescu dictatorship. I discuss prewar Transylvanian Jewish food culture, and subsequently locate Király's collection as a continuation of the tradition of the memorial or yizkor [‘remembrance’] books. Finally, I discuss Jewish cemeteries and the virtual social death of Jewish tradition in Transylvania, to ask: what is it that remains today from the shattered culture of Transylvanian Jewry?