ABSTRACT
Some spectral entities are never laid to rest. Resurrected as a martyr to defy death online, Neda Agha-Soltan will preside as a venerated spectral image in the virtual sphere. With her death captured on mobile phones and replayed endlessly on the internet, she was transformed from an ordinary bystander into a global icon and symbol of protest in Iran. The national and global outpouring of grief and the ensuing rituals that honoured her as a martyr unveil the significance of martyrdom in Iran but equally it convened spaces for communion and mourning online through her traumatic death imagery despite her anonymity. Immortalized through the internet and powered by a politics of pity, the young woman transcended mortality as a martyr co-located with death yet ritualized online to defy it. The notion of martyrdom through social media opens up notions of witnessing at multiple levels, reiterating iconic death as a restless site of rife human imagination.
