Where the dead refuse to sleep

Abstract

Some topics come at CSSH like waves, and their comparative potential is too big for a single issue to hold. In 2024-2025, we received so many manuscripts about the social life of death that we could not group them fast enough. We placed them under a variety of rubrics, where they made perfectly good sense, but four of these essays had a special gravity. They seemed to be pulling toward each other across our production schedule. We’ve decided to create a special “Under the Rubric” – spanning issues 67/4 and 68/1 – to accommodate their palpable attraction. Consider this package a holiday gift, in four parts: Foroogh Farhang. Death of the Gharīb: A Window towards a Regional Understanding of Displacement in the Middle East. Comparative Studies in Society and History. 2025;67(4):761-784. Marlene Schäfers and Maria Kastrinou. Martyrs, Dreams, and Past Lives: Insurgent Immortality and the Expansive Logic of Debt. Comparative Studies in Society and History. FirstView. Lucie Ryzova. Portrait of a Martyr as a Young Man: Social Lives of Photographs in Revolutionary Egypt. Comparative Studies in Society and History. FirstView. Stephanie V. Love. The Archive of Displacement: Vernacular History and Urban Cemeteries in Oran, Algeria. Comparative Studies in Society and History. FirstView. The essays have much in common: they are set in the Middle East; they examine multiple aspects of martyrdom; they fix our attention on the fact that the dead are a living force in political struggles, in resistance; and they show how pervasively urban landscapes are shaped and re-shaped by the movement of the dead—their bodies, names, and our memories of them. Most of all, the essays explore how hard it is for us to let the dead go and to bury them finally in one place. It is hard, too, for the dead to ignore us. As our authors show, the living and dead endlessly interact in the liminal spaces they co-create. We invited Farhang, Schäfers, Kastrinou, Ryzova, and Love to read each other’s essays and respond. They chose to do so in letters. As you’ll see, the impact of their shared insights is deep and sometimes unexpected, but it carries the fortifying effect of a vigil or a memorial at graveside. Each author is fully aware that she writes in a time of genocide, state collapse, ruthless dispossession, and historical trauma. None writes exclusively about Palestine, but Gaza is the backdrop and brutal intensifier of all their arguments. Beneath the carnage of the moment, each paper connects to older motifs. The stranger. The icon. Graves. Spirits. Martyrs. Mourning. Reincarnation. Resurrection. Blessings and curses. Paradise. It is a rich assemblage of ideas. It generates a feeling of responsibility for the dead. We always ask you to read the articles before scrolling down. We do so again, this time hoping you will notice that something ineffable is swirling through these essays. Something barely named. Is it the moral challenge of the “gharib,” the stranger? Is it the “anti-power” of death? Can we, the living, know? Join us in thinking it through.