ABSTRACT
This article explores forms of ‘grief-activism’ commemorating those who have perished on the move, in the waters surrounding EUrope, at physical border barriers or on EUrope’s streets and in its detention centres. Contestations in death protest the differential distribution of vulnerability and a politics of division, abandonment and necropolitical violence on which EUrope’s border regime thrives. Mobilising both Judith Butler’s notion of grievability and Jacques Rancière’s proposition of an ‘impossible identification’ as a heterological form of politics, this article examines what occurs in attempts to form solidarities in precarious moments of collective mourning. While a politics that seeks to include lost others must always be replete with impossibilities, it is argued that grief-activist practices that counter-perform exclusions in transformative political encounters engender imaginaries of what it might mean to create community ‘beyond borders’.
