Missing Migrants and the Politics of Naming: Names Without Bodies, Bodies Without Names

The essay asks what naming a body does, politically. It begins by examining practices of memory when people are missing after wars, terrorist attacks, or disappearances: when we have names without bodies. It then turns to cases of migrant bodies: bodies displaced from their established location, without documentation or recognition by governments. When those who are already missing in this way meet their deaths, they become unidentified decedents or bodies without names: undocumented dead who are doubly disappeared. The responses to these bodies reveal a tension between the care and concern they arouse and the exclusionary politics they reflect.