Representation of Bare Life in Literature and Cinema: An Agambenian Analysis of Exclusion in Wall by Yilmaz Guney and The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 Assistant Professor, Department of English Language and General Courses, Shahrood University of Technology, Shahrood, Iran.

2 M.A. in Persian Language and Literature, Kharazmi University, Tehran, Iran.

Abstract

This study aims at comparing the movie Wall by Yilmaz Guney and the novel The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead in the light of Georgio Agamben’s ideas. To that end, the researcher draws on Agamben’s famous statement that the paradigm of the modern world is the concentration camp discussed, extended, and revisited in his books Homo Sacer and Remnants of Auschwitz to find out how it emerges in Turkey and the US. The lives of the Kurds in Turkey and African Americans seem to follow the same trajectory Agamben had manifested in his example of the concentration camp as they are lives characterized by inclusive exclusion, suspension of law on many occasions by the sovereign to wield the necessary violence needed to make them surrender, the creation of the figure of Muselmann whose life is marked by complete submission and whose death is not possible as he is homo sacer, and finally the impossibility of a meaningful death as sovereign’s last technique to negate all meanings of Musselman’s life and death. The two works manifest the materialization of what Agamben had located as the paradigm of the modern age in showing how Turkish Kurds and African Americans have been going through the same situations Auschwitz residents had experienced. This very ‘life’ is still awaiting Turkish Kurds and African Americans and will be the hallmark of their lives in the future in tandem with what Agamben had argued would potentially happen to all people around the world.

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History

  • Receive Date: 27 August 2025
  • Revise Date: 04 May 2026
  • Accept Date: 05 May 2026

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