Inspirational Hauntings and a Fearless Spirit of Resistance Negotiating the Undercover Police Surveillance of Racialized Spaces in Istanbul

Abstract

This article tackles the conditions of the possibility of fearlessness and the radical refusal to be docile and complicit despite the likelihood of heavy punishments. Drawing on the experiences of the racialized Kurdish and Turkish Alevi residents of a working-class space in Istanbul that is constantly under the watchful eye of undercover police agents, I propose that despite its privileged position in law enforcement in Turkey and in other authoritarian contexts, the panoptic gaze of the undercover police does not always manage to push resistance off the stage into Scottian forms of covert resistance. To understand how certain individuals and populations continue to act out against punitive security states despite the potentially grave consequences, I suggest that we take into consideration the invigorating power of the martyred dead and hauntings. While anthropological studies on hauntings mainly focus on histories of violence and injustice, the history of the oppressed is marked not only by oppression but also by resistance. Only by taking into account what I call inspirational hauntings of past resistance and rebellious and defiant subjects along with hauntings of oppression can we understand how the questions related to ethics and justice that are raised by hauntings are translated into active, undisguised, subaltern resistance.