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How does an inquiry into life as it lives (or dies) amid mass
violence look like from the perspective of the "social"? Taking us
from Sierra Leone to India to Lebanon, Life, Emergent challenges
conventional understandings of biopolitics, weaving a politics of
life through the lens of life, not death. Arguing that the "letting
die" element of biopolitics has been overemphasized, Yasmeen Arif
zeros in on biopolitics' other pole: "making live." She does so by
highlighting the various means and the forms of life configured in
the aftermath-or afterlives-of violent events in contexts of law,
justice, community, and identity. Her analysis of the social
repercussions is both global and local in scope. Arif examines the
convictions made in the Special Court of Sierra Leone, the first
hybrid court of its nature under international criminal law. Next,
she explores the making of a justice movement in the context of
Hindu-Muslim violence in 2002 in the state of Gujarat, India. From
there she revisits the Sikh carnage in Delhi of 1984. Finally, she
explores a span of civil violence in Lebanon, and particularly, its
effects on the city of Beirut. This rigorously argued book brings
together the various strands of life and the social that each
chapter has disentangled-and in doing so it begins to frame a
politics of, and in, life.
How does an inquiry into life as it lives (or dies) amid mass
violence look like from the perspective of the "social"? Taking us
from Sierra Leone to India to Lebanon, Life, Emergent challenges
conventional understandings of biopolitics, weaving a politics of
life through the lens of life, not death. Arguing that the "letting
die" element of biopolitics has been overemphasized, Yasmeen Arif
zeros in on biopolitics' other pole: "making live." She does so by
highlighting the various means and the forms of life configured in
the aftermath-or afterlives-of violent events in contexts of law,
justice, community, and identity. Her analysis of the social
repercussions is both global and local in scope. Arif examines the
convictions made in the Special Court of Sierra Leone, the first
hybrid court of its nature under international criminal law. Next,
she explores the making of a justice movement in the context of
Hindu-Muslim violence in 2002 in the state of Gujarat, India. From
there she revisits the Sikh carnage in Delhi of 1984. Finally, she
explores a span of civil violence in Lebanon, and particularly, its
effects on the city of Beirut. This rigorously argued book brings
together the various strands of life and the social that each
chapter has disentangled-and in doing so it begins to frame a
politics of, and in, life.
By the summer of 2020, when the coronavirus had fully entered our
everyday vocabulary and our lives, religious communities and places
of worship around the world were already undergoing profound
changes. In Asian and Asian diaspora communities, diverse cultural
tropes, beliefs, and artifacts were mobilized to make sense of
Covid, including a repertoire of gods and demons like Coronasur,
the virus depicted with the horns and fangs of a traditional Hindu
demon. Various kinds of knowledge were invoked: theologies,
indigenous medicines, and biomedical narratives, as well as ethical
values and nationalist sentiments. CoronAsur: Asian Religions in
the Covidian Age follows the documentation and analysis of the
abrupt societal shifts triggered by the pandemic to understand
current and future pandemic times, while revealing further avenues
for research on religion that have opened up in the Covidian age.
Developed in tandem with the research blog CoronAsur: Religion and
COVID-19, this volume is a "phygital" publication, a work grounded
in empirical roots as well as digitally born communication. It
comprises thirty-eight essays that examine Asian religious
communities—Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Daoist, and Christian as
well as popular/folk and new religious movements, or NRMs—in
terms of the changes brought on by and the ritual responses to the
Covid pandemic. Studying religious narratives, practices, and
changes in the Covidian age adds to our understanding of not only
the specific groups in which they are situated, but also the
coronavirus itself, its disputed etiologies and culturally
contextualized exegeses. CoronAsur offers a comprehensive and
timely discussion of Covidian transformations in religious
communities’ engagements with media, spaces, and moral and
political economies, documenting how religious practices and
discourses have co-produced the meanings of the pandemic.
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