Death and Afterlives in the Middle East

Abstract

Abstract This special section draws on the associations between the dead and the living, and approaches death as not something final and complete but rather as a regenerative force for afterlives. Engaging with this framework, this section addresses the following questions: How do people process death into meaning and life for their communities, subjectivities, and political projects? How do sovereign and intimate claims on bodies, and the contestation among these multiple claims, shape the meaning of death and the production of afterlives? How does the symbolic and material life around death produce and shape people's emotional, religious, communal, and political worlds, as well as political economy and regimes of mobility and securitization? How do people create and/or transgress normative boundaries of religious, familial, political, and gender subjectivities through their negotiations over dying, rituals of death, and mourning? How do death and its afterlives help us develop new tropes to think about migration, mobility, regimes of security, war on terror, belonging, intimacy, and care?