Introduction

Abstract

Abstract The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) today is an epicenter for the theorization of absence. Scholars, in efforts to counter the politics that have erased and continue to erase humans and places from the region, frequently assert the microdynamics of resistance, resilience, and memory. The editors of the special section, “Following Absence,” acknowledge the urgent need for narratives of overcoming destruction and for acts of care and repair. However, this introduction articulates a different intellectual labor—one that examines the ways absences linger and perdure across the MENA. Rather than restoring or recuperating modes of presence, the editors ask, in what ways might absence be told and accounted for? How might new plotlines widen the scope of what can be perceived as absence, its work in the world, and the forms of agency and injury it shapes? In dialogue with the environmental humanities, this thematic section approaches human lives in embodied proximities to the nonhuman. It also relinquishes the need for storytelling to begin from a moment when annihilating violence has ceased, as though erasure could be safely contained in the past. Repetitive and accumulating, recursive and anticipatory, absences inhabit the present and future. Acknowledging these branching, seeping plotlines, the editors urge against any unified theory of absence for, or from, the MENA. Absence is defined by negation, fragments, and residues. By refusing its systematization in scholarship, this introduction calls for modes of attention that refuse the logics of power and foreground instead the flourishing of ongoing life. It then previews the special section's themes and articles.