Introduction

In 2015, first-time feature filmmaker Morgan Knibbe released to critical acclaim Those Who Feel the Fire Burning (2015), a documentary film that creatively examines what in mainstream discourses has most commonly been referred to as the contemporary European refugee crisis. Using a ghost or spirit to narrate and guide the film, the film also interrogates how such a change of register could transform our engagement with the urgent socio-political questions at stake: the matters of life and death in this contemporary climate, that is, the question of biopolitics , necropolitics and cosmopolitics. Theoretical explorations of biopolitics and necropolitics have also been taken up within the field of queer studies. Jasbir K. Puar has been particularly instrumental in provoking an expanding body of work on queer necropolitics. Alexander Weheliye closely analyses the racial dimensions of biopolitics and necropolitics in Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human.