The Politics of the Dead Body

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Abstract

Why have our political arrangements become dependent on the accumulation of dead bodies? How can our responses to the dead body reconstitute performance philosophy and political praxis in the present? Performance Philosophy’s special section on ‘the politics of the dead body’ considers how untimely, preventable, and politically induced deaths around the world inform ongoing struggles for collective liberation and care. The five essays collected in this special issue excavate what it means to seek solidarity with the dead to bring about radical change. Remembering bodies subjected to forms of lethal violence seeking to erase them, even post-mortem, these essays refuse the dominant economies of power through which the value of some comes to depend on the normalized devaluation of others. 

Author Biographies

Andrés Fabián Henao Castro

Andrés Fabián Henao Castro is a political theorist interested in postcolonial/decolonial theory, Marxism, psychoanalysis, and performance philosophy. He is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Boston, and the author of The Militant Intellect: Critical Theory’s Conceptual Personae (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022) and Antigone in the Americas: Democracy, Sexuality and Death in the Settler Colonial Present (SUNY Press, 2021). His work has also been published in Modern Drama, Critical Philosophy of Race, differences, Theoria, Theatre Survey, Theory & Event, Settler Colonial Studies, Contemporary Political Theory, and Hypatia, among others.

Elva Orozco Mendoza

Elva Orozco Mendoza is a political theorist interested in Latin American politics and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. Her research interests include extreme gender violence, critical approaches to state sovereignty, maternal activism, coloniality-decoloniality studies, and protest politics in Latin America. She teaches courses in the Department of Political Science and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Connecticut. Elva is completing a book manuscript entitled The Maternal Contract: A Subaltern Response to Extreme Violence in the Americas.

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Published

26-02-2025

Issue

Vol. 9 No. 2 (2024): With the Dead: Performance Philosophy, Dying, and Grief

Section

Special section: The Politics of the Dead Body

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Copyright (c) 2025 Andrés Fabián Henao Castro, Elva Orozco Mendoza

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