The People Are Still Alive

Abstract Since the Iraq-Iran war in the 1980s, Iraq has turned into a place of living in perpetual mourning. The US invasion in 2003, sectarian fighting, and terrorism have set Iraq on a course of disintegration and destruction. Iraq has become the space where necropolitics (i.e., Achille Mbembe’s definition of politics as the work of death) is the (dis)order of the day. Focusing on the subject in times of crisis, the present study sits at the nexus of necropolitical experimentation, digital media, satire, and dissent. The paper zooms in on Iraqi people’s uprising in October 2019 in conjunction with one of its major voices, namely Al-Basheer Show , an Iraqi satirical news program hosted by Ahmed Al-Basheer. Key contents of some selected videos and viewers’ reactions will be systematically analyzed to flesh out how satire and sociologies of the everyday continue the struggle against contemporary experiences of unspeakable environmental and human destruction.