Thanatic Ethics

This book emerges from "Thanatic Ethics: The Circulation of Bodies in Migratory Spaces", an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary project uniting social scientists, postcolonial scholars, and artists worldwide to raise critical issues related to the death of migrants. It urgently calls for migration studies to confront the consequences of Western governments' restrictive and necropolitical migration policies. The volume introduces thanatic ethics as a moral compass-a code of conduct that re-endows migrant deaths with meaning, ensuring they are remembered and mourned. Through diverse perspectives, contributors examine how social practices, political mobilizations, and artistic and literary representations can serve dual purposes: memorializing the dead while changing the gaze of the living on the unidentified dead. Enhancing awareness in the wider community could lead to the overturning of current migration policies. Thoughtfully organized into four sections, the book first explores how oceanic waters have been constructed as bordering agents-spaces of exclusion and death. The second section focuses on the politics of death, burial, and mourning, while the third confronts the fraught questions inherent to visualizing the Thanatic. The concluding section advances essential conversations about care, repair, and restitution. This essential text speaks to a diverse audience including scholars and students in migration studies, postcolonial studies, human rights, ethics, cultural studies, literature, and political science. It will also prove valuable for policymakers, human rights advocates, artists, and anyone concerned with the multi-layered aspects of migration. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies.

Bidisha Banerjee is Associate Professor of English in the Literature and Cultural Studies Department at the Education University of Hong Kong. She has published widely on South Asian diasporic literature and film, visual culture and the refugee graphic novel. She leads the international, transdisciplinary project "Thanatic Ethics: The Circulation of Bodies in Migratory Spaces". She has just published her monograph Traces of the Real: The Absent Presence of Photography in South Asian Literature (2025). Judith Misrahi-Barak is Professor in Postcolonial Studies at University of Montpellier Paul Valéry, France. Her expertise spans Caribbean, Indo- and Sino-Caribbean literatures, diaspora and migrant writing. She serves as General Editor of PoCoPages series (PULM) and has co-investigated AHRC research projects on Dalit literature as well as the one on "Thanatic Ethics". Her recent publications include a monograph Entre Atlantique et océan Indien: les voix de la Caraïbe anglophone (2021) and co-edited volumes with Routledge. Thomas Lacroix is CNRS Director of Research in Geography at the Centre for International Studies-Sciences Po in Paris. His work examines immigrant transnationalism, city networks' engagement with migration, and global migration governance. He co-leads research programs including "Thanatic Ethics". He recently published The Transnational Society: a Social Theory of Cross Border Linkages (2023) and The Transnational State: Governing Migratory Circulations (2024).

Foreword Introduction: From Death in Migration to Thanatic Ethics 1. The Residual Migrant: Water Necropolitics and Borderization 2. Necropolitical Ecologies: Creative Articulations of Nature's Death-Work in the Borderzone 3. Perilous Pacific: Thanatic Archive and Vietnamese Refugees 4. Negotiating Moral Authority for Body Repatriation: The Case of Senegalese Migration 5. Towards A New Kinship? Affective Engagements with Migrants Dead in the Mediterranean 6. "He Wants Me to Bring Him Home, Even in the Form of a Shell": Criminalized Bodies and Repatriation in Kamila Shamsie's Home Fire 7. When the People Behind the Scenes Come to the Fore: Touristic Venues as Zones of Visual Clash 8. Contemporary Art's Thanatic Work: Re-embodying the (Absent) Migrant Body 9. "The Pleasure of Drawing While People are Drowning": Graphic Literature and the Critical Engagement with Death in Migratory Spaces 10. Unburials and Skeletal Reconstructions: Narrative as Forensics in Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost 11. Spectrality and Thanatic Ethics of Care in Atlantique and Biutiful