Grievable Lives Research Articles

‘Time becomes memory, and memory becomes the ditch in which we drown’: rethinking modes of knowing the past in Ian McGuire’s The Abstainer (2020)

ABSTRACT This article argues that historical novels play a crucial part in rethinking contemporary modes of knowing the past. Drawing on Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics and Judith Butler’s thoughts on precarious life, this article elucidates the close relationship between modes of knowing the past and progressive politics in the present, crystallised in the political concept of grievability. National histories paint the picture of ‘a past without strangers’, in the terms of Achille Mbembe, creating narrow circles of grievability which do not challenge established solidarities and structures of political inequalities in the present. This article goes on to demonstrate that historical novels may subvert this nationalist fantasy through the portrayal of liminal characters in liminal spaces. Ian McGuire’s The Abstainer (2020), set in an intra-European colonial context, continually breaks the frame of what is considered a grievable life by criticising a mode of knowing the past that prioritises mourning the dead over caring for the needs of the living in the present. In conclusion, this article argues that The Abstainer ultimately proposes a radical and paradoxical mode of knowing the past: It urges us to recognise that commemoration of the dead may become an obsessions and justification for acts of violence, and encourages us to rethink not just what histories we tell, but also how we tell them.

Grievable Lives during the COVID-19 Pandemic: US-American Television, Melodrama and the Work of Mourning

The present article applies Judith Butler’s notion of “grievable life” to reflect on the manner in which selected US-American television series engaged in the work of mourning and memorializing the loss of life in the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, with the aim of noting which lives were deemed “lose-able or injurable” (Butler, Frames 1), and how precarity of life was reflected by fictional narratives that were conceived and produced during the first waves of the pandemic. The article focuses in particular on the way in which network scripted programming operating within the melodramatic convention, namely This Is Us, Grey’s Anatomy and Station 19, incorporated pandemic storylines and which aspects of pandemic reality were highlighted or, conversely, avoided scrutiny.

South Asian COVID-19 Memoirs: Mourning and Erasure of “Grievable Lives”

This article analyzes how narratives about the COVID-19 pandemic are beginning to memorialize lives lost in the crisis. It juxtaposes the author’s personal experience of the loss of family members with emerging memoirs by South Asian women to explore the diversity of genres like the lyric essay and the graphic memoir that memorialize lives lost to COVID-19. While acknowledging that the current pandemic and its effects are far from over, the essay argues that these memoirs are a conscious attempt to mourn and thereby restore the humanity of lives robbed of traditional acts of remembrance due to the isolation and bureaucracy of laws governing COVID-19 deaths and funerals. These texts by Barkha Dutt, Kay Sohini, and Jhumpa Lahiri are exceptional because the great majority of deaths during this time have been consigned to erasure, lack of documentation, or censorship. These texts are resisting the dominant trend to leave the pandemic behind and resume normal lives. By committing to grief instead of a facile recuperation, these memoirs are not just charting a private path of healing but also transforming private grief into a statement of shared suffering and solidarity, even when the pandemic has affected individuals differently based on stratifications of race, class, and privilege.

Protest, race and grievability: What does it mean for lives to matter?

AbstractIn this article I bring the political philosophy of Judith Butler to bear on contemporary and inter‐related arguments about race and (in)equality. Focusing most directly on the UK context and taking account of recent changes in UK law, I further address the role of social protest in the pursuit of equality and social justice. Starting with a seemingly simple question which echoes the language of contemporary social protest, I ask ‘what does it mean for lives to matter’. In responding to this I pursue the following aims: (i) develop an awareness of human mattering which moves beyond the lens of neoliberal individualism; (ii) generate an understanding of protest as an intensely human and ethical endeavour; (iii) engage Butler's philosophical arguments in a manner that is accessible to those unfamiliar with their work. I begin with an overview of contemporary social protests and outline recent developments in UK law before introducing key concepts from Butler's work. I then apply Butler's arguments to explore the construct and the language of mattering, before expanding on what it means to matter and the role of social protest in the pursuit of grievable lives.

Deploying fetal death: “Fetal burial” laws and the necropolitics of reproduction in Indiana

AbstractWhile abortion foes in the United States rhetorically promote “life,” discursive invocations of death are foundational to antiabortion advocacy. Pro‐life strategists have made gains mandating the mourning of aborted fetuses through fetal burial bills, which require abortion providers to cremate or bury fetal tissue from abortion procedures. Fetal burial bills are inextricably tied to biopolitical regimes that make and manage grievable life. Drawing on cultural anthropology, feminist social science, critical race theory, and long‐term research on white evangelicalism, this article examines government documents (e.g., Indiana statutes, court rulings, health reports, legislative activity, and state prosecutions) to provide a discursive critique of Indiana's fetal burial law. Constructions of aborted fetuses as grievable human life and the formations of personhood they promote undergird what anthropologist Leith Mullings called the necropolitics of reproduction—a framework explaining how reproduction is constitutive of political regimes that use systemic violence to determine who (or what) lives and dies. Legal conceptions of fetal personhood that hyper‐value fetal subjects entwine with systemic racism, Christian ideology, and anti‐environmentalism to diminish the Black and Brown bodies and environments on which their futures depend. This case is a bellwether for broader dynamics in anti‐abortion policy and activism in the post‐Roeera.

“He Wants Me to Bring Him Home, Even in the Form of a Shell”

This essay discusses the issue of body repatriation as it is dealt with in Kamila Shamsie’s 2017 novel Home Fire. Part of this modern rewriting of Sophocles’ Antigone deals with the protagonist Aneeka’s attempts to have the remains of her twin brother, Parvaiz, repatriated from Pakistan to England – as the siblings have always lived in London. Yet Parvaiz has been characterized as a terrorist by the British government and the repatriation of his body has thus been rejected by the Home Secretary. Drawing on Judith Butler’s work on public mourning and grievable lives, I will show how Shamsie’s novel offers a form of literary reparation regarding the death of a character that can be mourned neither privately nor publicly. Such reparation operates in at least two ways: it relies on the corporealization of its Muslim subjects as if what was at stake was to counter their invisibilization in society – the fact that Karamat Lone will not have the body repatriated, which complicates the mourning process; it also occurs through Shamsie’s use of intermediality. The omnipresent screens and media, instead of documenting the situation in an exhaustive way, add further distance between the Muslim subjects and us, readers, which counters the risk of the former becoming prone to public consumption. Shamsie’s novel also offers an acknowledgement of the extent to which the death of a relative occurring in a migratory context has forcible impact upon the ways of mourning and remembering the departed, as far as the bereaved family members are concerned.

Remembering the Holocaust in the Anthropocene

Abstract: This paper explores how the "environmental turn" for the last 25 years has been shaping remembrance of the destruction of Europe's Jewish populations. I argue that climate change is not just one more catastrophe to pass into the broad analogical field of the Holocaust. In fact, international Holocaust consciousness and understandings of what we now call the Anthropocene have long been intertwined and mutually constitutive. The paper starts in the 1990s with acclaimed writers Anne Michaels and W.G. Sebald, who sought to recast the Holocaust's significance to modernity against a long backdrop of geologic time. Their memorial fiction, which grounds the history of the Holocaust in the eroding landscapes of Europe, reflects a growing and urgent global concern for the vulnerability of the environment and a sense of man's responsibility for preserving human and biological life. The paper then moves through more contemporary examples of the sublimation of Holocaust memory in discourse about global warming—evident in terms like "climate change denial" and calls to "bear witness" to mass extinction events. For better or worse, journalists and scholars who write about environmental activism frequently call on memory of World War II and genocide in order to redefine what constitutes "grievable life." Example authors include historian Timothy Snyder, who has predicted that climate change may lead to new genocidal wars over Lebensraum ; scientist James Lovelock, who has urged nation states to consider how to limit the coming influx of climate refugees; theorist Bruno Latour, who has argued, via Nazi philosopher Carl Schmitt, that we must "name our enemies" in the new climate wars; and essayist Ari Brostoff who has attempted to think climate catastrophe through Walter Benjamin's meditations on the angel of history. The implicit question in all of their work is this: What histories and philosophical traditions can help us redefine humanity's entangled relationship to nature in order to take political responsibility for saving life on Earth? In other words, the Anthropocene requires "a usable past"—but what will that usable past be?

토니 모리슨의 <파라다이스>에 나타난 평등주의 상상계의 가능성

This study explores how Morrison’s Paradise delineates “a new space” of a possible resistance for the socially vulnerable in race and gender in terms of Butler’s concept of “an egalitarian imaginary.” The “egalitarian imaginary” seeks to achieve equal conditions of livability and grievablity, essential tothe determination of social equality. Both livability and grievability are the fundamental conditions to build social bonds grounded on interdependency and practice the force of nonviolence against the structural and physical violence. In Paradise the two communities, Ruby and the Convent, are the social abjects who search for a possible home to guarantee freedom and safety. Ruby, the black-only community, desires to fortify their “Paradise” based on reversed hierarchy of skin color and exclusion only to reveal that they are to justify structural violence. On the contrary, the Convent, though it was a mere group of social outcasts at first, emerges to an open space which enables the women to build social bonds by sharing their past trauma, searching for a possibility of livable lives, and claiming equal grievability on their deaths. Paradise presents the force of nonviolence derived from social bonds based on human interdependency that insists the equal claim to livable and grievable lives, thereby suggesting an unrealistic yet manageable vision of “an egalitarian imaginary.”

Making kangaroos grievable; making grievability non-human

When Australian economist Ross Garnaut proposed to increase the commercial kangaroo industry in 2008, it started a national debate on the supposed edibility of kangaroos. Campaigns against the commercial kangaroo industry and hesitance amongst many consumers to eat kangaroo reflect concerns about viewing kangaroos as food. This article explores the reactions and challenges that originate from the kangaroo’s changing role in society by using Judith Butler’s concept of grievable lives. Using this framework shows that what animals we eat goes beyond nutritional value; it symbolizes deeper values regarding human–animal relations and illustrates why and how not all animals are seen and treated as the same.

Reconceptualising Judith Butler’s theory of ‘grievability’ in relation to the UK’s ‘war on obesity’: Personal responsibility, biopolitics and disposability

How does Judith Butler’s theory of ‘grievability’ relate to the neoliberal imperative to assume personal responsibility for one’s actions? And how can this be conceptualised in relation to a broader biopolitics of disposability that renders some lives dispensable and others worthy of protection? Focusing on the particular case of obesity and the UK government’s drive to reduce obesity rates in response to COVID-19, this article shows how conditions that are seen to arise from poor lifestyle ‘choices’ complicate Butler’s articulation of grievability by revealing how state and public investment can coincide with a general consensus of apathy that renders those lives both grievable and ungrievable. By simultaneously straddling the two subject positions, I argue that people living with obesity are often rendered failures within a neoliberal context that equates grievable life with productive life, thus giving way to a new ontology that renders life valuable only when it is not directly harming, or is in the service of, others.

Ethical Limits of Pandemic Governance

This article explores the context-bound qualities of the legally sanctified practices of ‘quarantine’ and border closures as it examines the normalized invisibility of populations on the move who have not been ‘protected’ through the use of such standard Covid-19 measures. Inside national borders, isolation and quarantine orders are traditionally issued by states in accordance with the state’s broad powers to protect public health. Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, these orders have been either not applied to or on certain occasions intervened with or suspended when a quarantine was deemed unreasonable or inapplicable with reference to migrants, refugees and displaced people. The article proposes a redefinition of death as ‘death-in-living’ and ‘grievable lives’ as ‘disposable lives’ in order to understand the conundrum concerning the selective application of Covid-19 measures to irregular migrants, refugees, undocumented and non-status peoples and stateless communities. Legal responses to the pandemic continue to have a far greater impact upon populations on the move, displaced communities and refugees in radically unequal ways. The article reveals the ethical limitations of global pandemic governance in terms of how legal and policy-based practices systemically fail and desert certain populations and advances a notion of justice that starts from a deeper understanding of existing injustices.
 Keywords: global governance; death-in-living; grievable lives; populations on the move; Covid-19 pandemic; ethical limits of law.

Rethinking ‘the Human’ in Dystopian Times: Modified Bodies and the Re-/De- construction of Human Exceptionalism in Margaret Atwood’s ‘MaddAddam’ Trilogy and Kazuo Ishiguro’s ‘Never Let Me Go’ by Alessandra Boller

MLR, .,   Hogle and Robert Miles (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, ).) is is, however, a relatively new approach, which will be of interest not only to postcolonial scholars, but also those interested in history and the complicated relationship between past and present. U   W  E A R Rethinking ‘the Human’ in Dystopian Times: Modified Bodies and the Re-/Deconstruction of Human Exceptionalism in Margaret Atwood’s ‘MaddAddam’ Trilogy and Kazuo Ishiguro’s ‘Never Let Me Go’. By A B. Trier: Wissenschalicher Verlag Trier. . viii+ pp. €.. ISBN – –––. Alessandra Boller’s critical intelligence is of a high class; its sharpness can be seen in how she lays out her theoretical framework and applies theoretical points of view to analyse Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. She smartly builds up her case, brilliantly reassessing the ‘human’, exposing the ideological foundation of ‘natural and irrevocable beliefs, value systems and thought structures’, and concluding that this ‘rethinking has turned out to be inextricably connected to a reassessment of the apparently stable western dichotomy of human (“self”) and animal (“other”)’ (p. ). e deliberate, methodological treatment of her theoretical framework relies considerably on concepts including, but not limited to, Judith’s Butler’s ‘grievable life’, Michel Foucault’s ‘discipline and biopower’, Georges Canguilhem’s ‘explanations of definitions of physiological (“normal”) and pathological (“abnormal”) bodily states’, and, R. W. Connell’s ‘hegemonic masculinity’ (pp. –). It should be noted, however, that, while theoretical frameworks themselves are remarkable and useful, Boller’s theoretical applications are unfortunately uninspiring . Her enquiries oen reiterate deconstructionist vantage points with which serious readers are already familiar. Furthermore, her deconstructive approach to the ‘human’ in Atwood and Ishiguro is misleading and incomplete. Close reading reveals that the boundaries demarcating the human and the posthuman are not easily obfuscated. In the MaddAddam trilogy, for instance, human survivors (like Jimmy) are ‘positioned outside ecological conditions’ in places ‘superior to other inhabitations of the world’, whereas the posthuman Crakers are not only lacking in ‘symbolic learning and syntactic communication’ (p. ) but more importantly are dependent on humans for care, guidance, and education. Never Let Me Go, by contrast, suggests that a defining part of humanity is inextricably related to the possession of the Dasein (soul/spirit) regardless of one’s status (citizen or clone). Readers should also note Boller’s mishandling of the concept of the human and her hasty adaptation of animal studies to expand on posthumanism. ese interconnected missteps fail to incorporate critical discussions about the human not only in terms of sentience, language, autonomy, and culture but more importantly in association with crucial terms such as mind, soul, and spirit. ese latter concepts are not only leading principles in allocating humanity and personhood, but  Reviews also significant bases for distinguishing humans from animals or non-/posthumans. Her conclusions, for the above reasons, seem overly optimistic: she argues that, in these literary narratives, the deconstruction of demarcation strategies (such as normality/pathology, animal/human, human/posthuman) initiates a ‘process of overcoming anthropocentrism and speciesism’, displaying ‘the possibility of a new, positive multiculturalism’ that points to a ‘utopian possibility’ (p. ). ere is on Boller’s part a liberalistic tendency to overextend theoretical approaches in order to formulate opinions on contemporary political issues. For example, she makes clear, at various places in her book, that ‘animal species cannot logically be excluded from considerations of personhood and sympathy’ (p. ), and that they are entitled to human rights and power. is is not sufficiently borne out by the literary or theoretical texts under analysis. Many readers, however, may sympathetically regard Boller’s missteps as resulting from the ambitious enthusiasm of a young scholar. Despite its faults, her book should be acknowledged for its attempt to reassess the idea of the human, deconstruct human exceptionalism, and expose demarcation strategies in contemporary dystopian fiction. Since Boller relies heavily on deconstructive theories, her book is recommended for readers who want to familiarize themselves with deconstructive critical practice. Her next study will be worth waiting for with excitement, if it overcomes the allure of leaning too heavily on theory. B U  F S J Y Petits poèmes à voir: de la bambochade textuelle...

Practicing the Work of Worms: Lyric Voice and Grievable Lives in Solmaz Sharif's Look

Practicing the Work of Worms:Lyric Voice and Grievable Lives in Solmaz Sharif's Look Maria Capecchi (bio) Solmaz Sharif's poetry book, Look, is a poignant work filled with carefully crafted lyric poems as well as an important analysis of the effects of war. Her poems break new poetic ground, using erasure tactics, a complex lyric "I," and the reappropriation of terms from the US Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms (indicated by all caps in the poems)1 to adapt the lyric genre. Sharif's strong lyric voice combines the emotional intimacy of the confessional lyric with the intense call-to-action of the political lyric. Her voice is commanding: exposing her reader to a lyric world where the very language that makes up her poetry is undermined by multiple interpretations and meanings. Sharif demands that her Western reader unflinchingly view the costs of war in the Middle East and experience the shifting realities of a society where categorization defines an individual's worth. The poems are filled with startling images of violence juxtaposed with moments of intimacy and reflection. By replicating the immigrant experience through her lyric voice, she exposes her Western readers to the experiences of exile. Sharif's text explores what it means to truly look, to take in a life in its grievable2 state, to see the other and recognize ourselves. This recognition creates intimacy and [End Page 117] connection; her poem "Look" becomes a rallying cry, an invitation to the exilic state. Rather than asking us to leap into action, Sharif encourages us to pause, to consider, to see the "exquisite face" of the subaltern:3 Let it matter what we call a thing.Let it be the exquisite face for at least 16 seconds.Let me look4 at you.Let me look at you in a light that takes years to get here. (4–5) Rather than insisting on one sanctioned meaning, one voice, Look shares multiple and often contradictory voices. Through these lyric voicings, Sharif asks her Western reader to reflect on the wars in the Middle East and experience multiple perspectives within the conflict, including those of her family in Iran; her immigrant parents; US soldiers; and Iranian, Iraqi, and US citizens. Sharif's title alone, based on the military term "look," indicates the importance of being receptive, looking at something, taking it in (Department of Defense 318). The title exemplifies this process: to look indicates an ability to receive from someone else (a state Sharif asks the reader to inhabit). Mines, when influenced, explode, referencing the real use of mines in warfare and the cultural and political metaphorical minefields addressed in the text; and Sharif metaphorically "explodes" the Western concept (or frame) of the Iraq War. Sharif's claiming of words used to objectify Western targets gives a new voice to the concepts and people who are overlooked in the war on terror. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's work on the subaltern is an important theory underlying my understanding of the other and grievability as they relate to Sharif's lyric. Within the frame of the US war on terror, the Iraqi and Iranian people Sharif voices in her poems are classified as "deviations" and "differences" from the Western ideal. While some individuals Sharif voices, such as her uncle, do not completely fit Spivak's definition of subaltern, I find it helpful to use this term in order to interrogate the United States' political rhetoric that focuses on "deviations" and "differences." While these Iraqi and Iranian individuals may not fit the subaltern category in terms of social status within their own countries, the United States effectively treats them [End Page 118] as subaltern. To complicate the issue of voice further, Spivak identifies attempts at speaking for subaltern communities as emanating "from the self-diagnosed transparency of the first-world radical intellectual" (80), which disguises the Western speaker's imperialist and capitalist motivations. This perceived transparency masks the problematic nature of an outsider, including the subaltern elite, speaking for any people. Sharif's voicing of Iraqi and Iranian people is complicated within this construct as she is speaking for the subaltern from a perceived authority as...

Solmaz Sharif’s ‘Exquisite Face’ of the Other: Creating Grievable Lives through the Lyric

Lyric poetry is a genre constantly being renegotiated and redefined. From the fragmented parchments of Sappho’s ancient sung texts to the “American Lyrics” of Claudia Rankine, part of the thrill of the lyric form is its mutating nature. Solmaz Sharif’s poetry book, Look, is a masterful adaptation of the lyric form. Her poems combine erasure, Department of Defense terms, Wikipedia entries, and references to the Iran-Iraq and US wars of imperialism, collaging experiences of soldiers, immigrants, and citizens on both sides of the United States’ so-called War on Terror. In a world of political extremes, “cancel culture,” and reactionary social media platforms, Sharif’s political lyrics question representation itself. She calls upon her western reader: “It matters what you call a thing: Exquisite a lover called me. / Exquisite” (3), acknowledging the lyric’s traditional apostrophe—the fragile woman. Look's opening lines juxtapose the speaker’s exquisite body with the objectified targets of the Iraq war detailed throughout the poem: “Whereas the lover made my heat rise, rise so that if heat sensors were trained on me, they could read my THERMAL SHADOW through the roof and through the wardrobe” (3). The speaker is both the Petrarchan beloved and the military target, a target that refuses to remain outside the frame of war: “Whereas I thought if he would LOOK at my exquisite face or my father’s, he would reconsider” (4). While beautiful, Look is not a fragile collection of poems: her work is emotionally haunting, filled with raw, violent images. Particularly when viewed against the backdrop of the white, masculine lyric, Sharif’s work enacts social renegotiations of the lyric.

Remembrance Day for Lost Species

This essay explores the work Remembrance Day for Lost Species (RDLS), a coalition of artists, activists, and environmental organizations who memorialise the losses of extinction. I argue that RDLS's practices create an ethics of witnessing ecological loss in ways that expand discourses about what (and who) counts as grievable life. I take up Judith Butler's theorisation of the powers of mourning in rendering life legible to illuminate the ways RDLS mobilises grief and absence, thus reimagining relations between humans and nonhumans in a space outside of capital. RDLS participants unite on 30 November to bear witness to the extinction of species, habitats and cultures. The movement was founded in 2011 by UK-based performance collective Feral Theatre, artist Andreas Kornevall and Reverend Peter Owen Jones. Several other organizations and artists have since joined, though anyone may create participate, adding their events to the RDLS crowd-sourced electronic archive. I look at a particular event, the Lake Merritt Regenerative Memorial and Pollinator Procession (2017), to articulate the performance practices brought together under RDLS as a praxis of ethical witnessing in the time of climate crises. RDLS renders nonhumans as subjects through the creation of mourning rituals for extinct and endangered species. By approaching nonhumans through what Butler has called grievability, RDLS counters the human exceptionalism that supports the exploitation of nature as merely raw material for endless accumulation. By challenging this logic of accumulation, RDLS participates in a queering of normative capitalist time through the creation of a time-space outside of the inexorable forward movement of capital. As they engage in ‘nonproductive’ uses of time, RDLS resists the vast unmarked (biodiversity) loss intrinsic to global capitalism, bringing forth new forms of human and nonhuman relationality in the face of ecological breakdown.

Trumping the House that Race Built: Deracinating 21st-Century American Politics

With the shock election and subsequent inauguration in 2017 of its 45th president, Donald Trump, America appeared to go into mourning. Propagating discriminatory and divisive sentiment and instituting an exhaustive list of retrograde and repressive policies, Trump’s administration augured what political pundits viewed as national extinction. Yet, in eliding how African Americans in particular have historically lived, constantly and constitutionally, with the fear or threat of death, the apocalyptic populist discourse disseminated primarily by mainstream, white society has initiated within black communities a counter-discursive, restitutional cultural populism that risks similarly hierarchical and exclusionary, separatist iterations. Motivated by Judith Butler’s analysis in Precarious Lives of the exclusory mechanisms of national melancholia and influenced by (re)visionary contemporary black feminist theory and poetics, this essay first interrogates, in what are read to be variant but converging strains of populist discourse, who and what makes for a ‘grievable life’? Through a close reading of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, the essay demonstrates how its inspired articulation of African American slave life proffers a necessary lament for a disremembered past and dead black subjectivity and culture that at the same time revives in the present and for the future a broader, more inclusive, alternative vision and ontological idiom. In this way, the novel creatively expresses (particular and universal potential for) what is lost in the current moment – responsive and responsible, transhuman modes of being (and becoming) in the world.

Apprehending the “Telegenic Dead”: Considering Images of Dead Children in Global Politics

Images of suffering children have long been used to illustrate the violence and horror of conflict. In recent years, it is images of children that have garnered attention from media audiences around the world. In response to the deaths of four children killed by the Israeli army while playing on a Gazan beach, Israeli PrimeMinister Netenyahu accused Hamas of generating telegenically dead Palestinian children for their cause (CNN 2014). In this article, it argues with this term to consider the appearance of images of children in global politics. I draw on a growing literature relating to the corpse as a subject in international relations (IR), asking how children's bodies are understood, following Butler, as grievable lives. It explores the notion of iconic images and the politics of sharing images of bodies and consider global power relations that allow certain children's deaths to be visible and not others. Through this analysis, the article argues that the idea of telegenic death might be productively considered to understand how the fleshy reality of children's deaths contribute to discussions about the representation and visibility of children in contexts of crisis and conflict.

Grievable lives? Death by opioid overdose in Australian newspaper coverage

Opioid overdose deaths are increasing in Australia and around the world. Despite this, measures aimed at reducing these deaths such as safe injecting facilities and take-home naloxone continue to face obstacles to uptake. The reasons for this are manifold, but a key contributor is public discourse on opioid consumption and overdose. In this article we explore this public discourse using Judith Butler’s work on ‘grievable lives’. The article analyses mainstream newspaper coverage of opioid overdose in Australia to map key articulations of overdose and to consider how public understandings of overdose are shaped. It then goes on to consider ways these understandings might be reshaped, looking at what have been called overdose ‘anti-memorials’ and a new website Livesofsubstance.org. In concluding we argue that until the lives of opioid consumers come to be considered grievable, the measures known to reduce overdose deaths may struggle to find public support.

Tolerance Discourse and Young Adult Holocaust Literature: Engaging Difference and Identity by Rachel Dean-Ruzicka

Reviewed by: Tolerance Discourse and Young Adult Holocaust Literature: Engaging Difference and Identity by Rachel Dean-Ruzicka Tahneer Oksman (bio) Rachel Dean-Ruzicka. Tolerance Discourse and Young Adult Holocaust Literature: Engaging Difference and Identity. New York: Routledge, 2017. "What might be a more productive social justice project than liberal multiculturalism?" (10). Rachel Dean-Ruzicka poses this wide-ranging question about halfway through the introduction to her monograph, Tolerance Discourse and Young Adult Holocaust Literature: Engaging Difference and Identity. She engages with the problem by zeroing in on young adult (YA) Holocaust literature, mostly memoirs and novels published or republished in the past forty years, asking what close readings of these works can reveal about literary encounters with history and difference. Dean-Ruzicka builds on the ideas of some of the most compelling political and cultural theorists of our time, from Judith Butler, Lauren Berlant, and Wendy Brown to Audre Lorde, bell hooks, and Kwame Anthony Appiah. Dipping into their various frameworks along the way, she uses the lens of YA Holocaust literature to examine how literature can potentially complicate notions of difference to expand impressions of what, in Judith Butler's terminology, are all too commonly, and limitedly, determined to be "grievable lives." Dean-Ruzicka's project is rooted in a resistance to what she describes as the promotion of "tolerance and toleration language," a reductive approach to identity and difference that often ignores broader systems of power and privilege as well as the historical dynamics that determine how such structures emerge and unfold (2). Under the veneer of tolerance discourse, citizens are encouraged to simply "live and let live," a stance that compels passivity and reticence instead of action and resistance in the name of social justice, and that also encourages a "troubling relativism" (152). At its core, she explains, tolerance discourse suggests "disapproval itself" as its "central unspoken element" (8). Dean-Ruzicka posits "the ability to embrace difference" as a counterweight, describing this capacity as, in her terminology, a form of "cosmopolitan engagement"—a direct and involved confrontation with, and embrace of, Others (7, 9). Using YA literature about the Holocaust as her case study, an apt subset of literature given her pedagogical aims, she turns over a variety of stories, fiction and nonfiction, conventional prose-based texts and those built around photography or in comics, to determine which might promote such active engagement. Dean-Ruzicka divides her analysis into five discrete sections, a meaningfully constructed scheme that begins with a reading of Anne Frank and concludes [End Page 375] with literature starring Neo-Nazi characters. With its structure, the book implicitly asks readers to engage with questions of why certain texts come to be considered part of the category of Holocaust literature; the book also continually demands a reading of the past in the context of an urgent, always relevant present. In her first chapter, "Finding the Other in Anne Frank," the author astutely argues that the over-reliance on Anne Frank as an emblem of those who were murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators presents a variety of problems. Not only is Frank's Diary "misleadingly hopeful," ending as it does before members of the Annex were captured, sent to concentration camps, and, excepting Otto Frank, killed, but it also presents "few glimpses into Jewish culture's actual differences," given the Frank family's assimilated, generally nonreligious background (28; 31, italics in original). Dean-Ruzicka holds up, as evidence, the many problematic creative responses to Frank's text, which often involve an over-identification with her that glosses over her Jewishness. In other words, Frank's Diary, which happens to be "the most widely anthologized piece of literature, of any sort, for young adult readers in the United States," seems to have become such a cultural cornerstone precisely because it is so easy to forget that the author/narrator was Jewish (22). In her second chapter, "The Complexity of Jewish Lives," Dean-Ruzicka goes on to consider a variety of texts featuring Jewish characters in relation to the Holocaust. She narrows down the vast canon to books that are often taught as well as those representative of the themes that encompass this literature. These include...

Grievable lives: avatars, memorials, and family ‘plots’ in Second Life

Based on fieldwork within the virtual social world Second Life, this paper focuses on its Second Afterlife Cemetery, promoting itself as the first ‘bury your avatar site’. Avatars are symbolically buried and memorialised on this site and so too are the real-life biological deaths of people who may or may not have corresponding Second Life avatar lives and histories. Second Life is a place in which diverse forms of family relationships are created through role-play within games or through other processes such as Second Life adoption agencies and classified advertisements where residents seek out others to enter into family role-play relationships. Second Life role-play families are sometimes inclusive of real-life biological family members so that a type of blended family emerges also inclusive of non-biological Second Life role-play family members. Second Life is thus a place in which complex digital kinship systems operate, informing its bereavement and memorial culture. In examining the complexity of gender structure, relationships and family ‘plots’ of memorials, this paper argues that a biological death in real life while deceasing a second life does not amount to the loss of one life. Second lives are partially independent of the life behind the screen and may indeed challenge the assumption that the corporeal, ontological gravitas of physical real-world existence is the only way of life that really matters for grieving and remembrance. The activity of memorialising a second life based on avatar sociality and embodiment, acknowledges and gives value to a computer-mediated, screen-based way of life with its particular formations of identity and practices of relationship. It can be independent socially of real-life relationships and mourned on its own terms for what it meant to others in this avatar-embodied world.