The Necropolitical Gaze: Sovereignty, Self-Annihilation, and the Ethics of Witnessing in Anuk Arudpragasam’s A Passage North

In postwar Sri Lanka, the erasure of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) from the physical landscape often frames readings of Anuk Arudpragasam’s A Passage North (2021) around melancholia and trauma. Departing from this, I argue the novel articulates a “necropolitical gaze” that reclaims sovereignty through the persistence of vision rather than territory. Drawing on Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics and Jasbir Puar’s theory of “debilitation,” I trace the migration of Tamil sovereignty from the martyr’s body—the seed (vithu)—to the spectral archive of the text. First, I contrast the state’s reduction of Tamil life to zoe with the LTTE’s counter-logic of the gift (thatkodai). Second, utilizing Laura U. Marks’ “haptic visuality,” I analyze the blinding of Kuttimani to show how the novel recovers the ciliary capacity of the gouged eye, transforming debilitation into a transferred political gaze. Finally, I examine the “implicated subject” mediated through the digital screen. Ultimately, I posit that Arudpragasam constructs a “temple of the mind,” establishing a spectral sovereignty that refuses the foreclosure of the Tamil future.