Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the labour involved in commemorating the dead, suggesting that social reproduction is not only a question of maintaining life but also of sustaining afterlife. Commemorative labour has the potential to foster new social imaginaries, gendered orders, and temporal horizons.

Paper long abstract:

What kind of labour is involved in keeping the dead alive? Drawing on ethnographic research with members and followers of the Kurdish freedom movement, who spend much time and energy commemorating those who have fallen in the forty-year-old armed struggle for Kurdish autonomy, this paper proposes to regard their efforts as a form of reproductive labour. In a context where the dead and their memories are under constant, violent assault by state authorities, I suggest that social reproduction entails not just the making and maintenance of life, but also the sustenance of afterlife. For the Kurdish movement, commemoration is thus also a form of genealogical labour that seeks to establish fallen guerrillas as collective ancestors of a body politic yet to come. This labour questions established principles of filiation and establishes new, revolutionary forms of “lateral necrosociality” (Kim 2016) that challenge not only patrilineal privilege but also question the biopolitical horizon of social reproduction as inherently future-oriented. But maintaining the afterlives of the dead also involves work on the self. Focusing on narrative and visual forms of commemoration circulating both on and offline, I show how those engaged in the labour of producing a revolutionary ancestry perform intense affective labour to regulate their emotions in the face of violent loss. As such, the necrolabour of caring for the dead becomes a site where the challenges and contradictions of the Kurdish revolutionary endeavour are worked through.