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UC Santa Cruz UC Santa Cruz Electronic Theses and Dissertations UC Santa Cruz UC Santa Cruz Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Towards a Theory of Digital Necropolitics Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1059d63h Author Romeo, Francesca Maria Publication Date 2021 License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ 4.0 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA CRUZ TOWARDS A THEORY OF DIGITAL NECROPOLITICS A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction Of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in FILM AND DIGITAL MEDIA by Francesca M. Romeo June 2021 The Dissertation of Francesca M. Romeo is approved: _______________________________________________ Professor Neda Atanasoski, chair _______________________________________________ Professor Shelley Stamp _______________________________________________ Professor Banu Bargu _______________________________________________ Professor Kyle Parry _______________________________________________ Professor Lawrence Andrews ____________________________________________ Quentin Williams Interim Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1.1 Towards a Theory of Digital Necropolitics…………………………………………… ...1 1.2 Digital Necropolitics and Digitally enabled Necroresistance……………………5 1.3 Charting the Digital Revolution, Digital Necropolitics and the Rise of Necroresistance…………………………………………………………………………………………..9 1.4 Digital Necropolitics and the Construction of New Social Imaginaries…….29 1.5 Chapter Introductions…………………………………………………………………………..34 CHAPTER ONE: Networked TestImony as Necroresistance: SocIal MedIa and the ShIftIng Spectacle of LynchIng In AmerIca 2.1 Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………………45 2.2 The Logic of Lynching Postcards……………………………………………………………48 2.3 The Emergence of Digital Networked Testimonies………………………………….53 2.4 Diamond Reynolds and The Logic of Networked Testimonies………………….62 2.5 Performative Self Portraiture and the Emergence of the Political Selfie……79 2.6 Necroresistance Past and Present: Authorship, Appropriation, and Identification………………………………………………………………………………………………86 2.7 Aggregating Affective Sentiment…………………………………………………………….98 CHAPTER TWO: DIgital DecolonIalIsm: MappIng the Personal and Collective NecropolItIcs of MMIW 3.1 Digital interventions into MMIW at the nexus of Feminicide and Necropower……………………………………………………………………………………………….102 iii 3.2 A Necropolitics of Elision………………………………………………………………………112 3.3 Spatializing Injustice…………………………………………………………………………….120 3.4 Data Sovereignty as Care………………………………………………………………………153 3.5 Towards a Sovereignty of Spirits…………………………………………………………..158 CHAPTER THREE: Open Source InvestIgatIons as PractIce: The Forensic AesthetIcs of Post-Human TestImony……………………………………………………..171 4.1 A History of Open Source Espionage……………………………………………………..184 4.2 Art and Open Source Investigation Practitioners…………………………………...197 4.3 Walid Raad’s The Atlas Group: Traces of Spectacle………………………………...203 4.4 The Evolution of Forensic Aesthetics…………………………………………………….220 4.5 Post-human testimonies………………………………………………………………………234 4.6 Post-human Projects: A Comparative Analysis………………………………………249 4.7 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………………..263 EPILOGUE 5.1 The Testimonial Turn………………………………………………………………………….269 iv LIST OF FIGURES 1. New York Times, July 8, 2016. Stills from Diamond Reynolds’ Facebook Live stream………………………………………………………………………………………. 63 2. Trevor Paglen, Unmarked 737 at “Gold Coast” Terminal, 2006. Distance ~ 1 mile…………………………………………………………………………………………………171 3. Walid Raad, I want to be able to welcome my father in my house again, 1993………………………………………………………………………………………………..212 4. Walid Raad, I want to be able to welcome my father in my house again, 1993………………………………………………………………………………………………..214 5. Walid Raad, Let’s be honest, the weather helped, 1998………………………...215 6. Walid Raad, My Neck is Thinner than a Hair, 2001……………………………...216 7. Walid Raad, Notebook Volume 38, 1991……………………………………………..218 8. Walid Raad, “Oh God,” she said, talking to a tree, 2004………………………..250 9. Forensic Architecture, video timecode still from The Bombing of Rafah, video……………………………………………………………………………………………….252 10. Forensic Architecture, user-generated content still from The Bombing of Rafah,………………………………………………………………………………………………252 11. Forensic Architecture, bomb cloud analysis still from The Bombing of Rafah, video …………………………………………………………………………………….255 12. Forensic Architecture, crater analysis still from The Bombing of Rafah, video.………………………………………………………………………………………………255 13. Forensic Architecture, missile analysis still from The Bombing of Rafah, video……………………………………………………………………………………………….257 14. Forensic Architecture, composite spatial analysis, The Bombing of Rafah.……………………………………………………………………………………………...258 v ABSTRACT Francesca Romeo / “Towards a Theory of Digital Necropolitics” “Towards a Theory of Digital Necropolitics,” elucidates the intersection of technology, human rights, aesthetics, and testimony through representations of the dead, dying, disappeared, or wounded body. Theorizing interventions into "Digital Necropolitics” highlights how the digital revolution has reconfigured the limits of representation, altering our conception of the "human" at the site/sight of death. It explores how virtual forums and digital reconstructions extend biological death, transforming it into a productive "after-life" that can reanimate the corpse and harness mourning, testimony, affect, and identification as constituent elements of social identities and political movements. Working from the margins, networked, cartographic, and post-human forms of testimony address the spectacle of death, evoking different temporalities while contending with the impact of longstanding histories of oppression. In this manner, testimony works as both an interventionist force and one of accretion in which a multiplicity of voices that produce, circulate, and exchange evidence of violations amplify the devastating effects of trauma, reshaping social movements through an activist mourning. In this way, the body is not solely reduced to its vulnerability and death, creating a chain of reductive signifiers, but rather it enables a way of seeing through death and articulating its political relevance in order to project emancipatory visions of life that can viably imagine a future free from violence. vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The conception, research, and writing conducted to complete this dissertation occurred on a multiplicity of unceded territories. I would like to acknowledge the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, the Muwekma Ohlone tribe, and the Central Sierra Me-Wuk. I am indebted to the original stewards of the land that provided me with the resources to complete my doctoral research. I would like to thank my committee members for their guidance and insight throughout this process. Thank you to Dr. Kyle Parry, whose brilliance concerning all things digital and progressive is unparalleled. This is perhaps only matched by his empathy, which granted me the space to be myself in his classroom, making him a true rarity amongst academics. Thank you to Professor Lawrence Andrews, whose spectacular filmmaking provided me with the inspiration to seek new ways of understanding art as a strategy for lyrical interventions. Thank you to Dr. Shelley Stamp, who has modeled professionalism for me in a manner that surpasses other scholars. Thanks to her as well for being the first vii mentor to point out to me that all my research interests are deeply invested in understanding history and that I should not be afraid to chart my own path through it with my scholarship. Thank you to Dr. Banu Bargu for literally writing the book on necropolitics and for providing me with endless inspiration through everything she writes. It is rare for me to feel such a deep kinship with another scholar's work, and it makes me feel like I have a place in the world when I read her words. I would also like to thank various friends and colleagues who motivated my research. Thank you to Dr. Sylvanna Falcón for welcoming me into the Human Rights Investigations Lab and the Research Center for the Americas at UCSC. Building the foundation for the lab together and creating a space of experimentation was one of the richest academic experiences of my time at UCSC and integral to my theory/practice development in open-source investigations. Thank you to Dr. Bruce Thompson, whose generosity as a scholar, historian, and educator of Holocaust studies allowed me to find my voice with critical reflections when encountering testimonials of great despair. viii Thank you to Dr. Rebecca Hernandez for graciously sharing her knowledge of indigenous culture with me. Thank you to Dr. Alexa Koenig and Andrea Lampros for showing me what egalitarian and participatory politics can look like. Their approach to collaboration granted me much faith during my time at the Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley. Thank you to Dr. Saskia Dunkell and Dr. Fabiola Hannah, both essential interlocutors with whom I navigated the terrain of human rights and political conflicts in various conversations that informed this dissertation. A special thanks to Dr. Boreth Ly, whose uncompromising ethics and dedicated spiritual practice serve as a reminder to me to continue pursuing challenging topics yet with an aim to bend towards the light. Such deep thanks to my friend Star Black who blessed me with her presence in this life. She always faithfully encouraged me when I had doubts about my future and rallied
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