Paynter, E. (2025) ‘Black Mediterranean hauntings: border violence, burial, and anti-racist care work in Strange Fish’, Cultural Studies, 39(6), pp. 887–911. doi: 10.1080/09502386.2025.2538523.

Abstract: This article explores forms of haunting that shape lives and livelihoods in the Mediterranean, recognising the sea as a site of movement, labour, and death. The Mediterranean is now widely understood as a kind of deathscape, as people on the move from former European colonies risk and lose their lives en route to Europe. Yet the production of migrant death – its materiality and simultaneous spectacle and invisibility – is not simply a consequence of harsh border policies. Here, I trace how migrant death in the Mediterranean is a crucial part of the racialized mechanisms that maintain a precarious labour force within Europe and transform livelihoods across Mediterranean shores. Engaging the Black Mediterranean as a site of haunting, I centre the relationship between haunting and care in a reading of the 2018 documentary Strange Fish (dir. Giulia Bertoluzzi), which describes how the production of death in the Central Mediterranean has transformed the labour of fishermen in Zarzis, Tunisia, who have been rescuing migrants and burying the dead since the early 2000s. Writing as an ‘implicated subject’ (Rothberg) who has spent extended time in Italy with people who have survived the sea crossing, I read the film both in terms of the unfolding history it documents, as well as through the visual and sonic elements it employs to illustrate these entangled forms of care and labour. In solidarity with people on the move, I argue that, as necropolitical border regimes threaten to upend notions of the refugee and related issues of rights and justice, it is crucial to understand and engage death at sea not strictly as a migration issue, but as a quotidian reality entangled in questions of labour and social justice on all shores of the Mediterranean.

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Abstract: This article analyses how hunger and guillotines, revolution and food, butchers and protests are connected in the Spanish collective imaginary during the current temporality of crisis (2008–2013), with the aim of establishing its cultural grammar. By examining different representations of the crisis by means of gastronomy – including examples of graffiti and slogans, cooking TV shows and horror movies – I will describe the existing tensions between practices of resistance and collective imaginations of violent political change. I will propose that the social circulation of food and food images is a decisive contributing factor in the symbolic landscape of the crisis, shaping divided political economies according to the role of the citizens, the state or the corporations in control and the management of the collective access to nutritional goods. Pig slaughter versus the supermarket of the gods: two political universes offer their opposing poetic poles. On one side we will find (i) the subaltern logic of the popular distribution of proteins acquired, thanks to a founding act of communal violence (the slaughter of the pig). On the other side we recognize (ii) disciplinary, hegemonic logics based on the masking of biopolitical links between nutrition, economy and society (the supermarket of gods).

Citation: Méndez, G. L. (2014) ‘The cannibal wave: the cultural logic of Spain’s temporality of crisis (revolution, biopolitics, hunger and memory)’, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 15(1–2), pp. 241–271. doi: 10.1080/14636204.2014.935013.

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Sargsyan, N. (2022) ‘The exigencies of the necropolitical: rehearsing livability through feminist performative storytelling’, Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 32(3), pp. 289–305. doi: 10.1080/0740770X.2022.2360786.

Abstract: In this audio-textual performance woven as an Armenian fairy tale from ethnographic research, poetry, and songs, I employ the performative as part of a feminist aesthetic and pedagogical praxis. Through this feminist performative storytelling I affectively study and mourn the immobilizing effects of the densely interconnected processes of death-making whether it be through colonization, ecological extraction, militarization and war, or sex-selective abortions. Drawing on transnational feminist knowledge, I suture life-sustaining moments of respite and healing, however transient and quick, into this protracted study and mourning to practice living in the wake of ongoing catastrophes and crises.

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Rowland, A. L. (2017) ‘Zoetropes: Turning Fetuses into Humans at the National Memorial for the Unborn’, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 47(1), pp. 26–48. doi: 10.1080/02773945.2016.1238105.

Abstract: This essay advances a theory of zoetropes, or rhetorical figures that modulate the social status of living entities. Using fetal memorialization at the National Memorial for the Unborn as a case study, I identify the humanizing zoetropes of naming (antonomasia), en/voicing (apostrophe), and en/facing (prosopopeia). While the malleability of the fetal entity lends itself toward zoetropes, arguably all subjects are made zoetropologically. To be tropologically animated, or given life, means immediate absorption into a biopolitical field of regulation. Humanhood is among the most consequential of biopolitical thresholds through which an entity can be zoetroped. This essay contributes to rhetorical theory by locating the tropological means by which entities gain the public status of humanhood. The biopolitical discourses that work to include entities into humanhood are the obverse side of the coin from the necropolitical discourses that work to exclude entities from humanhood.

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Scaramuzzo, P. (2026) ‘Silence as erasure: incorporating party-and-play (PnP) and hookup app education into queered health curriculum’, International Journal of LGBTQ+ Youth Studies, pp. 1–18. doi: 10.1080/29968992.2026.2657861.

Abstract: The opioid and stimulant overdose crisis has increasingly intersected with queer sexual cultures, particularly through party-and-play (PnP) practices embedded within hookup, dating, and companionship apps (HUDCAs). While public health research has documented elevated risks associated with app-mediated, substance-involved sex, health education in secondary schooling has largely failed to address these realities. This conceptual article examines how curricular silence around HUDCAs and PnP functions as structural erasure, rendering queer adolescent youth – especially BIPOC queer youth – hyper-visible in risk surveillance yet invisible in curricular care. Drawing on Foucauldian analyses of power and silence, queer theory (QT), and critical race theory (CRT), the article argues that omission operates as a biopolitical mechanism that displaces sexual learning into unstructured digital spaces without guidance or harm-reduction support. Through historical parallels with HIV/AIDS education, the analysis demonstrates that educational discomfort has often preceded survivability-oriented intervention. The article concludes by proposing a queered, harm-reduction-centered framework for secondary school health education that integrates HUDCA literacy, PnP-informed harm reduction, and attention to racialized inequities, reframing education as anticipatory preparation rather than abandonment.

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Agathangelou, A. M. and Killian, K. D. (2006) ‘Epistemologies of Peace: Poetics, Globalization, and the Social Justice Movement’, Globalizations, 3(4), pp. 459–483. doi: 10.1080/14747730601022453.

Abstract: Poetics, as an epistemological approach, articulates alternative imaginaries to those proffered by the neoliberal world order. With a long history of drawing upon various sites to further its aims (e.g. the academy, the international studies association, political parties, the state), the neoliberal world order has used its epistemologies to constitute a hegemony emphasizing the state as the primary actor of political life. Feminists and scholars in postcolonial IR, black studies, and ethnic studies have challenged this idea, arguing that there are differential epistemological economies in world politics. Larger questions at stake in these different sites/cites include self and collective knowledge of marginal peoples and the envisioning of alternative, oppositional histories of decolonization, struggle and contestation. Traditional disciplinary boundaries become sites/cites of contestation about the forging and making of alternatives as academics, grassroots organizers, and activists, through poetics, work together to creatively engage questions of economies, power, history, and subject-formations.

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Bretherton, L. (2021) ‘Political Theology, Radical Democracy, and Virtue Ethics; or Alasdair MacIntyre and the Paradoxes of a Revolutionary Consciousness’, Political Theology, 22(7), pp. 627–649. doi: 10.1080/1462317X.2020.1867406.

Abstract: This essay analyses three concerns that arise at the intersection of ethics and politics through situating the work of Alasdair MacIntyre, particularly his conception of the relationship between Christianity and Marxism, in the context of debates in the British New Left and drawing parallels and connections between these debates and the work of C. L. R. James and Black Marxism. The first concern is the modern suspension of ethics in the name of politics. The second is the relationship between structural and personal transformation. The third is how forms of social life exceed, but are always under pressure from, existing forms of political economy and how this concern shapes articulations of political agency outside of statist and property-based understandings of citizenship. I contend that addressing these concerns is a background condition for the emergence of a revolutionary consciousness.

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Stojnić, A. (2017) ‘Only Cyborgs and Cockroaches’, Performance Research, 22(2), pp. 123–128. doi: 10.1080/13528165.2017.1315991.

Abstract: In 2013 a cyborg-cockroach which was advertised as “RoboRoach, the world's first commercially available cyborg” appeared at the market. RoboRoach is a live cockroach whose moves can be remotely controlled via a smartphone app, thanks to the electronic device that has been surgically applied to its body. It was promoted as a “science kit” for children. Two years later cyborg cockroach gained a completely new role. Teams of researchers, engineers and entomologists form renowned universities have been testing their possibilities to access areas that are difficult for humans to reach such as earthquake sites or nuclear disaster zones. From the smart toy, cyborg-cockroaches advanced to the rescue squads that could, for instance, be navigated to record and find human life in disaster zones. However, we can easily imagine, I will argue here, that the next (if not already present) iteration of the cyborg-cockroach will be for military purposes abused in the war machine, as well as another symptom of the mode of governmentality that Gilles Deleuze has defined as “the society of control”. Relating to the question of “turning animal” the above mentioned example offers the opportunity to investigate the unstable relations and problematic distinctions between humans, animals and machines, through the concept of cyborg. Here, I would like to introduce a decolonial perspective as well as the topic of necropolitics, into post-humanist debate, in order to question who has the position (the privilege?) to proclaim “the human” as obsolete and what is the politics that is revealed in such a theoretical and practical move. Who can turn the cockroach into remotely controlled cyborg and what does this “turning into” mean for humans and non humans alike?

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K’Akumu, O. A. (2025) ‘Could the State Benefit from Aristophanic Comic Relief? Philosophical Perspectives on Carnal Politics in Postcolonial Uganda’, Journal of Homosexuality, 72(12), pp. 2441–2465. doi: 10.1080/00918369.2024.2431269.

Abstract: This article is a critical analysis of the anti-homosexuality legislation in Uganda, a state in East Africa. It primarily uses Plato’s political philosophy as expressed in Aristophanes’ speech in the Symposium. Using the Aristophanic viewpoint, the study derived six analytical concepts that structure its findings, discussion and conclusion. These are: the origin and fall of man; all sexual orientations are valid whether lesbian, homosexual or heterosexual; sexual cravings are natural phenomena whether lesbian, homosexual or heterosexual; law encumbers natural feelings of love and should not be used to prohibit any aspect of sexual orientation; homosexual (man-man) relations generate greater political benefits than the rest; scientific knowledge can be used to justify Aristophanes mythological explanations of sexual orientation. These concepts have been transformed into analytical questions in the study regarding the morality, naturality and legality of homosexuality in Uganda. This has led to several conclusions: All sexual orientations are valid whether lesbian, homosexual or heterosexual; Sexual cravings are natural phenomena whether lesbian, homosexual or heterosexual; and Law encumbers natural feelings of love and should not be used to prohibit any aspect of sexual orientation.

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Pavan Kumar, M. (2012) ‘“Pulp Orientalism”: Endosmotic banality, terra necro and “splintered” subjects in Dan Fesperman’s The Warlord’s Son ’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 48(3), pp. 265–277. doi: 10.1080/17449855.2012.678710. Abstract: This essay draws attention to the much-neglected arena of Orientalism in pulp fiction. Although Orientalism in popular culture has received considerable attention, it is restricted to the representations of the Orient in science fiction, television, electronic media and Hollywood films. Following 9/11, pulp literature has emerged with a renewed force in American hard-boiled fiction, specifically in the genre of the “literary thriller” and the “international political thriller”. Unlike the Orientalism in canonic fiction, pulp Orientalism forges an endosmotic “style” of civilizational Othering by reducing Oriental topographies into death worlds (terra necro), while depicting its subjects as splintered, unstable and mutable. Drawing on the writings of Robert Irwin and Achille Mbembe, this essay attempts a conceptual exposition of pulp Orientalism through Dan Fesperman’s The Warlord’s Son.

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