Political Life After Death

Political life after death explores the implication of the dead in political life. The course examines the ways in which the dead and efforts to deal with the dead shape politics. It also explores how politics influences how society and the state deals with the dead. The course uses the gaze of the dead to explore major issues in contemporary politics including the state and its elaboration over time as series of institutional forms and practices; state-society relations; political contestation; and inter-communal relations. The sub-topics explored by the course will include the following: the undertaker/mortician state; the dead as political actors; funerals as political arenas; the ambiguous case of the disappeared; the politics of counting and disposing of the dead; exhumations as political labor; the politics of memorialization; atrocities against the dead and their places of abode; and the segregation of cemeteries.