Paper short abstract:

This paper addresses the importance of cultural archives of resistance and oppression in understanding the conditions of the possibility of fearless and hopeful struggle and the radical refusal to be docile and complicit despite the likelihood of heavy punishments.

Paper long abstract:

This paper addresses the importance of cultural archives of resistance and oppression in understanding the conditions of the possibility of fearlessness and the radical refusal to be docile and complicit despite the likelihood of heavy punishments. Drawing on the experiences of the racialized Kurdish and Turkish Alevi working classes in Turkey, I propose that state violence does not always manage to push resistance off the stage into Scottian forms of covert resistance. To understand how certain individuals and/or populations continue to act out against punitive security states and hope to transform oppressive social structures despite the potentially grave consequences, I suggest we take into consideration the invigorating power of the past resistance as well as oppression. While anthropological studies on hauntings mainly focus on histories of violence and injustice, the history of the oppressed is not only marked by oppression but also resistance. I suggest by taking into account what I call inspirational hauntings-- the hauntings of past resistance and rebellious and defiant subjects who seep into the present and serve as encouraging and emboldening political and ethical resources-- along with hauntings of oppression can we understand how the questions related to ethics and justice that are raised by hauntings are translated into active, undisguised, subaltern resistance.