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All content in this area was uploaded by Robert Bednar on Sep 08, 2016
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Placing affect: Remembering strangers at roadside crash shrines
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 threatened removal of roadside memorials, I argue that there is an economy of power circulating in the practice of roadside memorialization, where some subjects are deemed legitimately memorable and some are not, where some subjects are legitimately allowed to memorialize their losses in public landscapes and others are not, and where anonymous drivers who drive by are supposed to feel a certain way about it all. Such a complex constellation of territorialized affect has significant consequences for understanding the politics of affect and memory in public landscapes.
Roadside memorials or descansos have diffused from a Mexican/Southwestern regional Hispanic hearth to increasingly draw the attention of motorists and public officials throughout the United States. In the current context, the authors' attention is on privately and spontaneously erected memorials placed at the sites of fatal events. Typically these result from automobile accidents, though not exclusively. The intent of the present article is three-fold: 1) to identify meaning and significance in the precise placement of contemporary markers; 2) to directly investigate the motivation and purposes of memorial/descanso builders; and 3) to survey issues of traffic safety, highway maintenance, landscape or visual blight, and church/state relations arising from the placement and maintenance of these roadside memorials.