Livestreaming the ‘wretched of the Earth’: The Christchurch massacre and the ‘death-bound subject’

• Published in: Ethnicities Vol. 20; no. 5; pp. 803 - 822
• Main Author: Ibrahim, Yasmin
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London, England SAGE Publications 01.10.2020; Sage Publications Ltd
• Subjects: Archaeology; Capitalism; Consumption; Death & dying; Internet; Mass murders; Semiotics; Sharing economy; Torture; sharing economy; Islam; banality of evil; massacre; convergence; co-production of evil; Muslim body
• ISSN: 1468-7968; 1741-2706
• DOI: 10.1177/1468796820926746

The livestreaming of terror, its co-production through live consumption and the massacre of lives as ‘entertainment’ propelled us into another long abyss of ethical challenges in the case of the xenophobic terrorist attack in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019. Livestreaming, as part of the convergence of technologies, enables narration in ‘real’ time, dragging us into a new ‘banalisation of evil’ where terror and torture can be co-produced by inviting audiences to consume through the vantage point of the perpetrator. This article examines the Muslim ‘body’ through JanMohamed’s notion of the ‘death-bound subject’ where the continual threat of death foreshadows the Muslim body, imbricating it within a political and ideological archaeology wherein both its possibility of death and the performance of death enter into a realm of theatrics of production incumbent upon invoking new moralities around consumption and its residues as a screen image. The ‘wretched of the Earth’ and their residues as immaterial matter online as the ‘wretched of the screen’ connote a new architecture of violence conjoining the temporalities of liveness with the sharing features of ‘semiotic capitalism’.