Abstract
Our world today is a deeply violent one; it is riven with full-blown wars, low-intensity conflicts, genocides, mass shootings and other varied political and social persecutions. It is in this moment that a book such as this becomes significant. Life, Emergent is a compelling contribution to critical scholarship on questions about life and its reclaiming, especially in the aftermath of immense violence. Arif zeroes in on the civil wars in Sierra Leone and Lebanon, the Muslim carnage in Gujarat, and Sikh massacres in New Delhi. While the case studies are different, the book is not an effort to homogenise the incidents and the ensuing sufferings; it illustrates instead how ‘bios and pathos’ undergird the pursuit of life and afterlife. Arif reads the incidents of mass violence not as ‘stand-alone’ but as those that carry with them the epistemological instrumentality of a ‘dispositif’: an apparatus. She develops the paradigm of ‘event-afterlife’ which traces its genesis to her fieldwork in post-war Beirut. Through her constant engagement with the questions of life after violence, she attempts to illustrate how it is lived under conditions of extreme precariousness. Engaging deeply with classic and contemporary philosophers and theorists, she investigates the question of life, but more in the context of its recognition, saving and potential. In answering her questions about ‘bios’ as life emergent or life extant, she finds theoretical moorings in Roberto Esposito’s re-visitation of Foucault’s biopolitics. She iterates that Esposito’s framing focuses on an affirmative biopolitics, which is a departure from an overt thanatopolitics. For her, the ‘bios’ in the afterlife of violence is not only about consequence or effect but more about vulnerability and potential.
In each of her research locations, she illustrates the lived experiences of the survivors and their responses that she categorises under themes of law, justice, community and identity. These themes permeate each location, but the author prefers to categorise in order to integrate her findings. Her analysis includes understanding formal structures that come into being after violence and how they ‘bear’ on the event. She hones into the affective world that emerges around the survivors and aspects of their subjectivities and subjectification. Developing two interrelated analytical strands, she illustrates how the social aftermath can be framed, proposed and customised to a particular condition of the afterlife, and how life finds form and embodiment. Her notion of social recovery in terms of policy, experience and representation draws from the work of Veena Das and Arthur Kleinman.
In Chapter 1, Arif focuses on Sierra Leone. Here, in the context of law, she analyses the working of the first special court that had the mandate of the International Criminal Court. Engaging with the question of what constitutes humanity, she begins by telling us that it is often contoured by the acts of transgression. She takes the example of child conscription, which for the first time was held as a crime against humanity in Sierra Leone. She illustrates how child conscription became ‘an international emotional and a professionalized response in law’ (p. 54) that appeared as the ‘figure of a violated childhood’. Calling such a response an ‘international social’, she says that this manifests a universalised notion of life.
In Chapter 2, Arif focuses on the train burning incident in Godhra, Gujarat, in 2002 and Nyaygrah, a social justice movement. In these events, she explores the ‘afterlife’ through claims to justice. She presents some compelling juxtapositions between Sierra Leone and Gujarat, where after the killings of Muslims no truth and reconciliation commission could be instituted. She analyses Nyaygrah to illustrate how local civil society gathers for redress when international mechanisms are not available. She observes that mass violence in India like the Muslim massacre after Godhra are often known as communal riots. Even though she flags ‘state complicity’ which often includes ‘blatant administrative negligence to suspension of justice mechanism’ (p. 71), thus fuelling such incidents, she does not use it as an analytic. In doing so, she hopes to draw the reader’s attention to an extended understanding of state power to show how it systemically and legally imposes violence on selected masses. Considering the atmosphere of increased communal violence in India, this chapter is illuminating. She extends her analysis further to explore how the state apparatus empowers its surrogate agents to react in the political–public space. It is in such transference of power, she argues, that violence is made invisible and administrative and legal measures stand constrained. She sees movements such as Nyaygrah as coalescing of community empathy, which becomes another domain of affect and fashions a strategy of ‘reasoned empathy’ (p. 99). Reasoned empathy, she suggests, is one that makes a new political space, a new political action (p. 94). The book is hopeful after all!
In Chapter 3, Arif revisits the genocidal attacks on the Sikh community in 1984 after the assassination of the then Prime Minister of India, Indira Gandhi. She analyses how the ‘work of surviving’ continues in the community. She juxtaposes her own ethnographic analysis with that of Veena Das, whose groundbreaking work on the Sikh riots was pivotal in establishing social suffering as an approach to understanding the human consequences and response to war, violence, famine, conflict and disease. She follows the survivors in multiple sites and traces how surviving a violence that is based on a politicised identity delineates such groups, creating the ‘notion of a homogenous identity’ (p. 9). She finds that the work of recovery has made and unmade the community, and created striations that separate and integrate the social map of the violent aftermath.
In Chapter 4, Arif analyses the civil war in Lebanon and its aftermath in Beirut. She paints a picture of a city where she spent her early research years as one that is marked by territorial neighbourhoods. In Beirut, she traces the afterlife of violence to the anxieties of a de-stabilised cosmopolitanism. Focusing on the faith-based identity of the people rather than the usual race, class, gender and sexuality, she finds that the afterlife in Beirut ‘is intensely about marked bodies in space and about marking bodies with place’ (p. 160).
In conclusion, the heart of this book—the paradigm of the ‘event-afterlife’ which Arif proposes—is a meaningful analytic in thinking about mass violence, instead of just ‘catastrophe’. She reasons that the combinatorial meaning in the ‘event-afterlife’ includes the event and the following narratives, practices and experience of recovery, which become productive in knowing not only what happened but also what happens after. She alerts us that the framing of the afterlife is not yet fully coherent, unlike social suffering, which—as a theoretical approach to understanding violence—is more rigorously tested in terms of analytical clarity. But without doubt, as an evolving analytic for understanding life and the social, ‘event-afterlife’ enables the framing of and grappling with the ceaseless violence that is increasingly becoming the hallmark of everyday human life. Life, Emergent is a book with a deeply human heart; even if theoretically dense at places, it is a must-read for those seeking a yet another important lens to understand life and survival in a violent aftermath.