Description
In May 1985 six adults and five children connected with an organisation called MOVE died in a fire in a home in West Philadelphia. The fire was caused by a bomb the Philadelphia Police Department dropped on the house after a standoff between the city and MOVE. As I have argued elsewhere, the MOVE bombing and the violence of the standoff, which involved both the police and fire departments, must be understood not as an anomaly but rather part of a long history of militarised policing and racialized violence in the United States (Hall 2021) In this paper, I look at the aftermath of this event – specifically examining what happened to the bodies of the MOVE members and their children after the bombing. Drawing on recent reports resulting from investigations into the retainment and use of MOVE member remains without consent at Princeton University and University of Pennsylvania, I argue that in the decades since 1985 the practices of excavation, processing, and forensic analysis that led to the fragmentation and circulation of the MOVE remains show how the body continues to be a site of racialized violence after death. Through engagement with this specific case, the paper reflects on broader questions about how we conceptualise the postmortem body in IR. While drawing on current scholarship that sees the postmortem body and bones as political, I argue that these conceptualisations need to better account for the ways that the postmortem body is shaped by historical and ongoing global structures of racialized violence and commodification.
