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Robert M. Bednar, MADD crosses incorporated into larger shrine, Airport Blvd. at MLK Blvd., Austin, Texas, USA, February 2010. Photograph courtesy of the author
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This article explores affect and memory at roadside car crash memorials within the context of what Achille Mbembe calls “necropolitics”: the performance of power to determine who legitimately can kill both persons and the memory of persons. By analyzing the ritualized performance of compulsory compassion in news media stories about the actual or th...
Contexts in source publication
Context 1
... citizen access to public roadscapes as well as the larger discourse of safety (see Packer 2008). 4 In between these official state signs and private vernacular shrines are others that are officially endorsed by states but produced and maintained by nongovernmental organizations. The most prominent example is the MADD memorial cross program (see fig. 2). MADD uses roadside memorials not only to commemorate victims of drunk driving but to forward their larger political goal of changing cultural ideas and practices involving drinking and driving (see Lerner 2011). MADD has lobbied to secure their right to maintain these crosses as an exception to state policies banning other roadside ...
Context 2
... / By a Drunk Driver. Most MADD memorial crosses stand alone on the roadside, but many, like state memorial signs, are the location of ongoing shrine work (see fig. 2). Unlike official state memorial signs, which usually contain an explicit public safety message targeted at anonymous drivers, such as "Drive Safely" or "Don't Drink and Drive," the MADD crosses are focused entirely on remembering the victim and are even more direct in their description of the cause of the trauma they mark. 5 The ...
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Citations
... Furthermore, it is especially attentive to the central role played by visual art practices in redistributing sense perceptions. Empirical research has focused on diverse spaces, including the bombsites of post--war Britain (Highmore, 2013); roadside memorials in the USA (Bednar, 2013); real and imagined council estates (Waites, ...
Islands have long been alluring to sojourners from outside, especially when they are, or are assumed to have been, abandoned. The island lure becomes more powerful when the abandonment is represented in the media in ways that evoke compelling affective responses. Against this background, I intend to critically examine the affective mediascapes of abandoned islands by focusing on three Chinese examples. I argue that it is necessary and possible to de-affect the media lure of abandoned islands in a place-specific way and probe for alternative affective responses in relation to one or several dominant affects in a given context.
... Researchers struggle to definitively say because, like all rhetoric, the purpose depends on the audience and context of the encounter, features that constantly change in memorial sites. Scholars argue that this lack of agreement has led to a dichotomy over expressions of remembrance where official memorials sanctioned by institutions are often pitted against more democratic or vernacular expressions of commemoration represented in grassroots memorials (Margry and Sanchez Carreterro;Santino;Bednar, 2012 and2013), temporary memorials (Blair & Michel, 2007;Haskins;Morris), digital memorials (Hartelius; Hess; Hessler), and items purposefully left at permanent memorials (Hass; Helmers). Put simply, this literature indicates that the voices of institutions sometimes speak against (or drown out) the individual voices who have a personal stake in the memory text. ...
This essay describes the commemorative response to shootings that occurred at Virginia Tech on April 16, 2007 and draws attention to the liminal stage between the appearance of the temporary April 16th memorial and its permanent replacement. Analysis reveals that the “place-dictates” used by those granted place-making authority over the construction of the permanent memorial provide important clues concerning the intended ideologies and subject positions prescribed through the site and the extent to which the public accepted such prescriptions. Attention to these “place-dictates” reveals the ways in which the institution aimed to camouflage its intentions by mimicking the vernacular design of the temporary memorial.
... Most of the scholarly work done on the material culture of memorialization has focused on national and civic memorials, where losses are often recuperated into national or civil myths of collective identity to figure losses as sacrifices on behalf of the collective to some larger collective good (Kelly, 1997;White, 1997;Dwyer and Alderman, 2008;Savage, 2009;Doss, 2010;Wells, 2012). However, scholars studying the more personal memorialization of loss in roadside shrines have pointed out that in the absence of a collective narrative frame that might be mobilized to make the loss "mean something," roadside shrines bring public visibility to personal loss but have difficulty translating that loss into collective action larger than the politics of public grief, which demand "feeling something," but not much else (Gibson, 2011;Cann, 2014;Bednar, 2013;Rose, 2009). ...
... Mostly this is because there is not a systematic perpetrator/victim dynamic as there are with these other forms of traumatic violence. Some scholars have argued that street and roadside shrines constitute a "populist reclamation" of public space (Seremetakis, 2016: 78), and there often are implicit inequities at play here in terms of what Judith Butler calls the "differential allocation of grievability" in contemporary societies (Butler, 2004: xiv;Butler, 2009), but without clear systematic injustice beyond that to fight, roadside shrines hardly ever mobilize further collective action (Bednar, 2013). Indeed, this fact itself is one of the things that makes the trauma of a car crash linger at roadside shrines. ...
This is an essay about how the material remains of automobile crashes remain in place to give road trauma a performative dimension through material objects. The paper draws on two decades of fieldwork on multiple roadside shrines throughout the American Southwest, but focuses on the site of the 1989 Alton school bus crash, which claimed the lives of 21 junior high and high school students in Alton, Texas, a small town on the border between Texas and Mexico. My analysis focuses on the way the trauma of the crash lives on in the materiality of the site—how it is structured visually, materially, and spatially at the shrine, but also how it is situated in relation to the adjacent intersection, guardrails, and fence, as well as the quarry and city park below. I argue that the shrine ensures not only that lost bodies receive a material afterlife in the form of a commemorative memorial, but also that the trauma of losing those lost bodies takes on a material afterlife in the structure of the site as well. By integrating both of these sets of material afterlives, the shrine becomes capable of translating Alton's collective trauma to a much broader collective made up not only of subsequent generations of Alton residents, but also of anonymous non-residents, forming a vast trauma collective that is stretched across time but always anchored to the materiality of the site.
... However, in the 'logic of martyrdom,' the death of a person is fused with the willingness of taking the enemy along. Necropolitics is equally significant for the "study of landscape, memory, and affects it helps conceptualize that decisions to either encourage or deny territorialized effect are political acts with clear political consequences" (Bednar, 2013). The present study uncovers how fictional characters play the politics of power, war, and death. ...
Purpose of the Study: This study emphasizes the contribution of fiction in highlighting the American exercise of power around the world predominantly Pakistan and Afghanistan. It investigates how America has become a dictating body deciding the life and death of human beings mainly in South Asian developing countries. Methodology: Being Qualitative, this study uses Eaglestone’s (2000) close reading technique to analyze words and structure of the texts of Khalid Hosseini's The Kite Runner and Nadeem Aslam Khan’s The Blind Man’s Garden. It develops a descriptive thesis leading to construct arguments by drawing a theoretical framework from Mbembe’s necropolitics (2003). Mbembe took his inspiration from Foucault’s idea of bio-power. Modern narrative discourse on sovereignty and its relation to war is taken as the main subject of necropolitics. Mbembe’s idea of sovereignty as an exercise to get control of the mortality of the enemy helps to interpret the texts via the close reading method. Main Findings: This study evaluated two novels to assert that necropolitics by taking its four basic concepts, power, war, politics, and death was the actual controlling power of a country. It analyzed fictional characters to argue how individuals endured hardships because of the necropolitical exercise of America and Russia in Afghanistan. Mbembe’s conception of necropolitics helps in understanding fiction. Applications of this study: The present study has significant implications from both theoretical and interpretative perspectives. Necropolitics, originally a political notion is reworked in fiction, which asserts that using this concept, power relations, their roots, and exercise around the world can be explored in various fields. This study contributes to dismantling the latent necropolitics in the society represented in fiction. It elevates the social and political consciousness of the general public of South Asia, particularly Pakistan and Afghanistan. This study can be helpful in the field of psychology to popularize the notion of necropolitics in contemporary society. Novelty/Originality of this study: Comparatively a new field, Necropolitics has been discussed in the fields of medical sciences and education. This study significantly highlights its existence in the field of literary studies. Fiction as a direct reflection of society helps in deconstructing the prevailing exercise of necropolitics in South Asian society. It is also helpful in raising the social and political consciousness of South Asian people.
... Crosses placed at the sites of fatal road accidents are part of the memorialisation phenomenon. Everett (2002) and others (Clark and Cheshire 2004;Reid 2013;Welsh 2017) have referred to them as roadside crosses or memorial crosses (Clark and Franzmann 2006;Bednar 2013). Crosses are reported by researchers in many countries of Christian heritage. ...
... For instance, in 2005, a group advocating the separation of church and state (American Atheists, Inc, Cranford, USA), sued the state of Utah in federal Court for allowing memorial crosses on public land (Dickinson and Hoffmann 2010). Nevertheless, there are legally approved, small, white crosses in some parts of the United States, which are a part of the Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) programme, commemorating only victims of impaired driving (Everett 2000(Everett , 2002Bednar 2013). By contrast, the general public in Ireland tends to disapprove of roadside memorials within Catholic communities they are inappropriate ways of commemorating the dead, as they disrupt societal norms of imagined equal status in death (Graham 2017). ...
The paper contributes to the discourse on roadside memorialisation in the countries of Christian heritage in Europe, Australia, and North America. The aim of the paper is to assess the social perception of the motivation of people constructing roadside crosses at the places of fatal car accidents along public roads in Poland. Is it religious, cultural or both religious and cultural? The uniqueness of this survey lies in its representativeness of the population of one country and the religiosity variable incorporated into a public opinion poll. The study proves that there exists a relationship between one’s declaration of faith and the perception of memorial crosses. Believers more often than atheists opt for both a religious and a cultural meaning of roadside crosses. Atheists and agnostics more often than believers associate roadside crosses only with a cultural meaning—the custom of marking places of death with crosses.
... A number of research on roadside memorials has increased recently (a few authors publishing in the 1990s and over 20 in the XXI century). As for the spatial scope of the research by continents, the majority of authors conducted their studies on roadside memorials in North America (Bednar 2013;Clark and Cheshire 2004;Dickinson and Hoffmann 2010;Everett 2002;Henzel 1991;Owen 2011;Reid and Reid 2001;Tay et al. 2011;Zimmerman 1995), followed by Europe (Diasio 2011;Klaassens et al. 2009;Maddrell 2013;Nešporová and Stahl 2014;Petersson 2009;Przybylska 2015), Australia (Breen 2006;Brien 2014;Clark and Cheshire 2004;Clark and Franzmann 2006;Hartig and Dunn 1998;Welsh 2017) and Asia (Cohen 2012). In Europe, the studies on the topic were conducted in Sweden, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Italy, Romania, the Czech Republic and Poland. ...
... In Europe, the studies on the topic were conducted in Sweden, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Italy, Romania, the Czech Republic and Poland. Most works are focused greatly on the forms and functions of roadside memorials (Diasio 2011;Everett 2002;Petersson 2009); studies of different types concern the law, official policy and social perception (Bednar 2013;Dickinson and Hoffmann 2010;Reid 2014) as well as the impact of roadside memorials on drivers' behaviour and safety (Tay et al. 2011). The paper is a part of the predominant way of examining roadside memorials by looking for their detailed characteristics (forms) and the role (function and meaning) they play. ...
... A number of research on roadside memorials has increased recently (a few authors publishing in the 1990s and over 20 in the XXI century). As for the spatial scope of the research by continents, the majority of authors conducted their studies on roadside memorials in North America (Bednar 2013;Clark and Cheshire 2004;Dickinson and Hoffmann 2010;Everett 2002;Henzel 1991;Owen 2011;Reid and Reid 2001;Tay et al. 2011;Zimmerman 1995), followed by Europe (Diasio 2011;Klaassens et al. 2009;Maddrell 2013;Nešporová and Stahl 2014;Petersson 2009;Przybylska 2015), Australia (Breen 2006;Brien 2014;Clark and Cheshire 2004;Clark and Franzmann 2006;Hartig and Dunn 1998;Welsh 2017) and Asia (Cohen 2012). In Europe, the studies on the topic were conducted in Sweden, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Italy, Romania, the Czech Republic and Poland. ...
... In Europe, the studies on the topic were conducted in Sweden, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Italy, Romania, the Czech Republic and Poland. Most works are focused greatly on the forms and functions of roadside memorials (Diasio 2011;Everett 2002;Petersson 2009); studies of different types concern the law, official policy and social perception (Bednar 2013;Dickinson and Hoffmann 2010;Reid 2014) as well as the impact of roadside memorials on drivers' behaviour and safety (Tay et al. 2011). The paper is a part of the predominant way of examining roadside memorials by looking for their detailed characteristics (forms) and the role (function and meaning) they play. ...
... Scholars have engaged with memory in a range of spatial registers including: memorialization and contestation (Lebow, Kansteiner, & Fogu, 2006;Legg, 2004Legg, , 2007Mitchell, 1994Mitchell, , 2003aSidaway, 2007;Sidaway and Mayell 2007;Stig-Sørensen & Viejo-Rose, 2015;Till, 2003Till, , 2005Young, 1994Young, , 1999; burial sites and deathscapes (Anderson, Maddrell, McLouglin, & Vincent, 2010;Barker, 2018;Bednar, 2013;Leshem, 2015); historical landscapes (Bender, 2002;Della Dora, 2008;DeLyser, 2003;Foote, 2003); sacred and pilgrim landscapes (Anderson et al., 2010;Schramm, 2011). 1 Landscape research in particular presents a significant medium and lens through which to study how hinterland communities cope with the legacies of violence. As geographer Don Mitchell (2003a, p. 790) notes, memory has been 'perhaps the strongest focus of landscape research in the past few yearslandscape as a concretization and maker of memory' often leading to studies of the nexus of memory, agency and questions of culture and politics (Mitchell, 2001(Mitchell, , 2003bTill, 2005;Wylie, 2007). ...
... This article situates itself within the growing literature analysing the aftermath of conflict through the lens of place. Although acknowledging the value of recent contributions of Necropolitics (Barker, 2018;Bednar, 2013;Mbembe, 2003) and Necrogeography (Lesham; Kniffen, 1967) to interrogate contested meanings, cultural politics, and power relations of violent sites this article diverges in a number of key respects from the primary content of those studies, namely that the dead to which the Lovas field memorial commemorates are not buried there and the field itself is not contested space as it is communally owned. 2. The Croatian national discourse on post-war memory is framed and officially defined by the Croatian Declaration on the Homeland War (Deklaracija o Domovinskom Ratu) in 2000: 'The Republic of Croatia led a just and legitimate, defensive and liberating war, which was not an aggressive and occupational war against anyone, in which she defended her territory from the great Serb aggressor within her internationally recognised borders.' 3. Urban studies has also increasingly recognized the limitations of 'city-bounded' theorization. ...
This paper examines the role of landscape in the local experiences of traumatic events in a rural hinterland of the Croatian-Serbian border. We study how landscape sets conditions and affords particular opportunities for local memory practices in response to traumatic events in a former clover field in the village of Lovas in Croatia. Like urban environments rural areas may be physically scarred by conflict, yet the effects are often less explicit, particularly to the external gaze. Like cities, rural landscapes may be ‘wounded’ and remain unsettled as sites of trauma. Landscape presents a significant medium and lens through which to study how hinterland communities cope with the legacies of violence. Often local communities are subject to state-led memorialization that tends to perpetuate conflict. However, under particular circumstances local actors may also harbour the distinct potential of landscape to enact the work of memory in closer correspondence to their needs. Recent scholarship has revealed the importance of place in the memory culture and politics of traumatized communities in urban borderlands. We argue that landscape settings in the hinterland of state borders play no less significant a role in mediating the complex dynamics of conflict and its aftermath for local commemorative practice.
... In more ideal environments, memorials inject a 'politics of public a ect' into public space. 30 Yet, within the politically contested zone of the Euphrates river basin, a ect is generated within informal memorial sites by Armenian pilgrims and local Dayris who served as guides, interpreters, diggers and collectors of bone. These vernacular pilgrimages were immaterial micro-performances permitted by the authoritarian state. ...
This article discusses how Armenians have collected, displayed and exchanged the bones of their murdered ancestors in formal and informal ceremonies of remembrance in Dayr al-Zur, Syria – the final destination for hundreds of thousands of Armenians during the deportations of 1915. These pilgrimages – replete with overlapping secular and nationalist motifs – are a modern variant of historical pilgrimage practices; yet these bones are more than relics. Bone rituals, displays and vernacular memorials are enacted in spaces of memory that lie outside of official state memorials, making unmarked sites of atrocity more legible. Vernacular memorial practices are of particular interest as we consider new archives for the history of the Armenian Genocide. The rehabilitation of this historical site into public consciousness is particularly urgent, since the Armenian Genocide Memorial Museum and Martyr’s Church at the centre of the pilgrimage site were both destroyed by ISIS (Islamic State in Syria) in 2014.
... Even if roadside memorials are illegal in a state, removing them immediately may or may not be fully enforced. Roadside memorials are part of the political landscape, and are important to study when understanding systems of power controlling who is memorialized and who is not (Bednar 2013). ...
... Public and private reactions to sudden traumatic death can take many forms, yet similar relationships link their social purposes and a shared belief in the personal affect communicated by the memorial (Bednar 2013). When one drives by a roadside memorial, it is meant elucidate certain thoughts and feelings depending on your connection to the individual memorialized. ...
... Clark and Franzmann (2006) argue that memorials and accounts of their construction demonstrate a willingness to express grief in individualized and un-prescribed ways that in turn can challenge authorities when memorial builders assume the rights to transfer public space into sacred space. Bednar (2013) questions the cultural politics of affect and memory at roadside memorials and addresses how politics work to control memory in public landscapes. In this sense, political authority and individual memorialization is at odds regarding who can memorialize others, and who can and will be memorialized. ...
