Description
Book SynopsisRecent years have brought public mourning to the heart of American politics, as exemplified by the spread and power of the Black Lives Matter movement, which has gained force through its identification of pervasive social injustices with individual losses. The deaths of Sandra Bland, Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, and so many others have brought private grief into the public sphere. The rhetoric and iconography of mourning has been noteworthy in Black Lives Matter protests, but David W. McIvor believes that we have paid too little attention to the nature of social mourningits relationship to private grief, its practices, and its pathologies and democratic possibilities.
In Mourning in America, McIvor addresses significant and urgent questions about how citizens can mourn traumatic events and enduring injustices in their communities. McIvor offers a framework for analyzing the politics of mourning, drawing from psychoanalysis, Gree
Trade Review
McIvor weaves together Greek tragedies, ancient and modern political theory, and stories of truth and reconciliation commissions (TRCs) in South Africa and Greensboro, North Carolina, to argue for the importance of such commissions to American democracy.... The afterword links the democratic work of mourning to the fairly new Black Lives Matter movement, as well as to recent books by Claudia Rankine and Ta-Nehisi Coates, and would serve well as a stand-alone reading assignment on race and racism. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students through faculty.
-- M. R. Michelson, Menlo College * CHOICE *
