Abstract
What happens when what Christina Sharpe calls “wake work” moves online? How do digital networks and algorithmic imaginaries shape forms of commemoration and mourning in the face of ongoing revolutionary struggle? This paper tackles these questions through ongoing research on the digital commemoration of fallen guerrilla fighters celebrated as martyrs by the Kurdish liberation movement. These fighters, the movement insists, do not die; they attain immortality. Digital spaces have emerged as crucial sites where such immortality is constructed and perpetuated but also doubted and contested.
Drawing on both quantitative and qualitative analyses of a dataset of several thousand Tweets as well as ethnographic research in online spaces, this paper inquires what kind of afterlives fallen fighters acquire thanks to the specific affordances of digital media. A rapidly growing body of literature on digital death and mourning has heralded a return of the dead to our everyday lives thanks to digital media ranging from Facebook walls and email bots to avatars and mind cloning. But there is little investigation of what this means in contexts of ongoing revolution and political contestation. How do digital media allow the restless, violently killed, and contested dead to make an appearance in the lives of the living? How do the living mobilize the specific qualities and affordances of these media to make not only the lives but also the afterlives of these dead matter?
If digital media have the capacity to animate the dead, this happens in partial, fragmentary, networked, and iterative ways. These specific qualities of digital animation, I suggest, frustrate attempts to develop cohesive and singular narratives around Kurdish martyr figures. Instead, digital media allow for the constitution of new martyrial choreographies that are less anchored in grand narratives of national liberation than in everyday, mundane, and intimate interactions. Rather than monumental commemoration, this paper argues, the digital emerges as a space of engagement where what Sharpe describes as logics of redaction and annotation allow defending and resurrecting the dead in always partial yet no less potent ways.
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