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Writing, Advocating and Resisting during Genocide
  • ISSN: 2515-8538
  • E-ISSN: 2515-8546

Abstract

This article argues that regret in is not a private sentiment but a politicized affective structure shaped by post-invasion biopolitics. Drawing on Judith Butler’s theory of grievability, this article reads Jawad’s mourning as a quiet protest, a fragile assertion of humanity amid the debris of imperial abstraction. Lauren Berlant’s concept of lends language to Jawad’s longing – for an elsewhere, a before, or perhaps only a pause in the forward march of loss. And Michel Foucault, always circling the thresholds of power and death, offers a way to see how sovereignty retracts itself, how the care of the dead is delegated to the privatized, the solitary and the exhausted – when the state has turned away. These theoretical strands are not simply applied; they are embodied. They haunt the novel as the dead haunt Jawad, as regret shadows every gesture he cannot complete. does not offer resolution. It offers, instead, texture – of grief as it accumulates unevenly, distributed by war, by empire and by the slow decay of meaning. What Antoon offers is not comfort, not healing, but a trembling space in which to dwell beside the afterlives of violence and with the bodies – living and dead – left behind.

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2026-03-16
2026-04-22

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/content/journals/10.1386/jciaw_00171_3
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  • Article Type: Article
Keyword(s): cruel optimism; grief work; grievability; mortuary labour; necropolitics; post-invasion Iraq; precarious life; sovereign abandonment

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