The Visual Afterlife of Abdelkader Bennahar

“Robert Desjarlais has a rich repertoire of method and thought that he uses to produce truly extraordinary insights about how historical moments linger and propel the character of violence into our present. Reconstructing the events and circumstances leading up to the murder of Abdelkader Bennahar, Desjarlais shows how the highly fragmented, competing, and sometimes altogether absent elements of a story alter the meaning of photographic and written records. I will think about this haunting book for a long time.” - Todd Meyers, author of Gone Gone

“Robert Desjarlais attempts a bold, ethnographically inflected biothanatography of an Algerian man most likely murdered—along tens of thousands of other peaceful Algerians—by the French police in Paris. Tracking Bennahar’s life and death, Desjarlais weaves a dense fabric of interchanges and blurred boundaries between writing genres, academic disciplines, and geographic territories to speak broadly and poetically about the power of state violence and the spectral hauntings it engenders.” - Hannah Feldman, author of From a Nation Torn: Decolonizing Art and Representation in France, 1945–1962