The Visual Afterlife of Abdelkader Bennahar

Introduction 1 1. Wound Images 23 2. A Sporadic History of Images 77 3. Intersecting Lives 127 4. The Afterlife of a Death 179 5. Tracework 213 6. The Spectrality of Remnants 259 Acknowledgments 275 Notes 279 References 301 Index

"Robert Desjarlais has a rich repertoire of method and thought that he uses to produce truly extraordinary insights about how historical moments linger and propel the character of violence into our present. Reconstructing the events and circumstances leading up to the murder of Abdelkader Bennahar, Desjarlais shows how the highly fragmented, competing, and sometimes altogether absent elements of a story alter the meaning of photographic and written records. I will think about this haunting book for a long time." - Todd Meyers, author of Gone Gone "Robert Desjarlais attempts a bold, ethnographically inflected biothanatography of an Algerian man most likely murdered - along tens of thousands of other peaceful Algerians-by the French police in Paris. Tracking Bennahar's life and death, Desjarlais weaves a dense fabric of interchanges and blurred boundaries between writing genres, academic disciplines, and geographic territories to speak broadly and poetically about the power of state violence and the spectral hauntings it engenders." - Hannah Feldman, author of From a Nation Torn: Decolonizing Art and Representation in France, 1945-1962