The remembrance of dismembered bodies

Abstract

For nearly three decades, the United States has pursued a border security strategy that has precipitated the deaths of thousands of migrants. Most of these deaths transpire unseen in remote stretches of the Sonoran Desert, where individuals are reduced to disarticulated bones. Endeavoring to overcome political indifference to these deaths, religious leaders, artists, and activists have joined in public works of mourning. These works strive to lend visibility to an otherwise invisible crisis and to grieve otherwise ungrieved lives. Thus, they usher the dead back into the polis and confound the boundaries between insiders and outsiders. However, the effort to re-present the dead runs the risk of making a spectacle out of the violence perpetrated against migrant bodies, inuring us to their witness or, worse, eliciting a perverse enjoyment. This article seeks first to offer a theological justification for political acts of mourning, before going on to articulate a strategy for resisting the dangers implicit in the remembrance of dismembered bodies.