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Based on a study of intersecting French archives (those of the Val de Grâce Hospital, the Service Historique de la Défense and the Archives Diplomatiques), and with the support of numerous printed sources, this article focuses on the handling of the bodies of French soldiers who died of cholera during the Crimean War (1854–56). As a continuation of studies done by historians Luc Capdevila and Danièle Voldman, the aim here is to consider how the diseased corpses of these soldiers reveal both the causes and circumstances of their deaths. Beyond the epidemiological context, these dead bodies shed light on the sanitary conditions and suffering resulting from years of military campaigns. To conclude, the article analyses the material traces left by these dead and the way that the Second Empire used them politically, giving the remains of leaders who died on the front lines of the cholera epidemic a triumphant return to the country and a state funeral.
12 Abandonment and victory in relations with dead bodies John Borneman Katherine Verdery was the first to make some systematic observations about the accelerated movement of dead bodies in EastCentral Europe following the collapse of the Soviet Empire. She noted that, in this period of political transformation, the corpses of political leaders and cultural heroes accrued certain powers leading to a struggle over appropriating those powers, and to the exhumation and displacement of their bodies (Verdery 1999). Here I wish to consider the modes of appropriation
surprising if the local Ottoman politicians still maintained a backward view that bad roads and limited access to the hinterland strengthened their control over their provinces: In any case, the successive emancipation of the Balkan nation states and the continuing penetration of western capital in the Empire in search of new markets greatly enhanced the importance of the Ottoman European provinces. Particularly after the Crimean War and the opening of the Suez Canal, Macedonia assumed
’ itself.8 Such cartographic ambitions suggest for Bowker that these databases are a direct continuation of the drive for the imperial archive: to govern the furthermost reaches of the ‘natural empire’ (Bowker 2008: 121). Bowker also draws our attention to how these databases do not so much conserve as create the world in a certain form, through practices of naming and classification. One of the most pressing concerns therefore that resurfaces in reading scientific databases as archives is how this classification and ordering enact a certain topography of remembering and
previous massacres, with the motivations behind them political, ideological, racial or religious, and fitted into a generalized background of violence and the construction of nation-states or territorial empires.3 Mass violence was also a symptom of new types of political regime, with no precedent in human history.4 Yet, in spite of their scale and variety, and in spite of their millions of victims, European massacres and genocides on their own do not allow us to draw a definitive typology of mass violence, for other continents have seen, and indeed are still witnessing
questions whether the treatment of corpses should mirror nationalism and even community, nation, or empire building. And if all the contributions ultimately show the extent to which the treatments of corpses are indeed political, this is demonstrated not only at the macro level of empire building, which has already been demonstrated by genocide scholars such as Mark Levene,20 but also at a regional or even local level. This extends to the pursuit of controlling space, not necessarily aimed at territorial expansion, as well as, on a more intimate level, embodying a
their own cultures, and to commemorate their own wartime past’.37 Notes 1 Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper characterize the Japanese invasion as a ‘Rape of Malaya’. See C. Bayly & T. Harper, Forgotten Armies: Britain’s Asian Empire and the War with Japan (London: Penguin, 2005), p. 208; Geoffrey C. Gunn argues that the planning and coordination of the sook ching massacres summon comparisons; G. Gunn, ‘Remembering the Southeast Asian Chinese massacres of 1941–45’, Journal of Contemporary Asia, 37:3 (2007), 273–91. 2 For various estimates, see M. Shinozaki, Syonan
used to be a communicative gesture – a way to state who is sovereign – the emergence of biodisciplinary power enabled the sovereign social group to optimize its own life by means of minimalizing the life of its adversary (or assumed to be adversary) social group. Ontological biopolitics attempts to elaborate this historical emergence of the distinction between life worthy of living and life unworthy of living by accentuating its negative normative value. Whether embodied in the trans-historical figure of the homo sacer, empire’s radically novel mode of subjugation in
–849 . Barnett , M. ( 2011 ) Empire of Humanity. A History of Humanitarianism . New York : Cornell University Press . Bausch , D. and M. Clougherty ( 2015 ) ‘ Ebola Virus: Sensationalism, Science, and Human Rights ’, The Journal of Infectious Diseases 212 , S79–S83 . Bhabha , H
transformed the landscape in different ways. Under the Ottoman Empire in the mid-nineteenth century, the area was a frontier rather than the border ‘line’ that came to typify post-Westphalian Europe as naturalised, timeless and self-evident (see, e.g. Green 2009). Like other ‘shatterzones of empire’ (Bartov and Weitz 2013), this imperial borderland was marked by permeability, brisk and diverse forms of mobility, ‘flexible’ governance strategies and ambivalent loyalties among the population (e.g. Reinkowski 2003; Blumi 2003). As Reinkowski argues, it was the distinctive