Necromedia, Haunting, And Public Mourning in The Puerto Rican Debt State: The Case of ‘Los Muertos’

Abstract

This essay attends to the intersections of haunting, indebted citizenship, and economies of affect, in media representations of national mourning. It centres on the concept of necromedia as it pertains to the mobilisation of a Puerto Rican indebted subjectivity based on a hauntological logic within a neoliberal and mediatic regime. Following Marcel O’Gorman’s definition of necromedia as ‘the collusion of death and technology,’ I argue that as the site where the idioms of subalternity summon notions of citizenship and public mourning, necromedia has become the prevailing mode of representing the social death of the Nation-State’s unwanted citizens, in what I have come to call the ‘Puerto Rican Debt State’ (O’Gorman 13).