Corpse geographies in Munnu: a boy from Kashmir: sites of resistance and post-mortem agency

Abstract

Malik Sajad’s graphic novel Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir (2015) is a Künstlerroman that draws from his experiences growing up in Kashmir. It relies on a surfeit visuality of mutilated corpses and dug-up graves functioning as essential to the iconography of a geopolitics of fear. The necropolitical economy of Kashmir is intent on the obliteration of bodies, inscribing the wounded and dead in new power legibilities. Corpse geography, formulated by Craig Young and Duncan Light, extends human geography beyond living bodies by engaging with the materiality of corpses and their agency. Their corporeality is in a dialogic engagement with human and non-human elements, which complicates the absolute material annihilation intended. A study of ‘corpse geographies’ reveals how necropolitical destruction is subverted and actively resisted by and at the very site it chose to destroy. This paper analyses corpse geographies in Munnu and proposes the fecundity of graphic narratives as a form whose aesthetics of embodiment and visual materiality renders the political agency of corpses legible in visual registers of excess. It’s corporeal aesthetics complement the political materiality of corpses as active agents of resistance in the face of hegemonic discourses about death and dead bodies in states of exception.

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