Elegaic Literature And The Necropolitics: Testimonial Poetics In Conflict Zones

Abstract

This study examines how elegy, necro-politics, and testimonial poetics connect in the literature of Palestine, Sri Lanka, and Kashmir, the occupied regions characterized by persistent state violence, dispossession, and militarization. This study explores how literary elegies serve as counter discourses, lamenting not only individual loss but protracted destruction of communities. The paper draws on Judith Butler’s concept of precarious life, and Achilles Mbembe's theory of necro-politics, which questions how sovereign forces govern mortality and designate zones of death. The paper contends that elegiac literature produced in the zones of conflict, creates a place for moral opposition and remembering in situations when death is normalized, routine, and politically[1] controlled. Elegies in these literary works function as testifying poetics rather than passive laments; they record suffering, mourn the un-mournable, and oppose memory suppression. The writers from these zones reinterpret elegy as a public record of violence, injustice, and disrupted lives rather than a private act of grieving. The paper makes the case—supported by critical readings of a few chosen poetry and narrative texts—that these works provide a politics of mourning that defies erasure, affirms the worth of the oppressed, and gives voice to those who are silenced by necro-power regimes. The study specifically looks at how writers recover the deceased through acts of literary testimony, how women's grief becomes a political force, and how the landscape itself becomes elegiac. The potency of elegy as testimony in the face of occupation—where the dead are not just remembered but are adamantly reinserted into the moral and historical conscience of the world—is highlighted by this research.