American Mourning: Tragedy, Democracy, Resilience
Cambridge University Press
Edition: First Edition, 7/20/2017
EAN 9781316610589, ISBN10: 1316610586
Paperback, 246 pages, 22.8 x 16.2 x 1.5 cm
Language: English
How does the way in which a democratic polity mourn its losses shape its political outcomes? How might it shape those outcomes? American Mourning: Tragedy, Democracy, Resilience answers these questions with a critical study of American public mourning. Employing mourning as a lens through which to view the shortcomings of American democracy, it offers an argument for a tragic, complex, and critical mode of mourning that it contrasts with the nationalist, romantic, and nostalgic responses to loss that currently dominate and damage the polity. Offering new readings of key texts in Ancient political thought and American political history, it engages debates central to contemporary democratic theory concerned with agonism, acknowledgment, hope, humanism, patriotism, and political resilience. The book outlines new ways of thinking about and responding to terrorism, racial conflict, and the problems of democratic military return.
1. Pericles at Gettysburg and Ground Zero
tragedy, patriotism, and public mourning
2. A homegoing for Mrs King
on the democratic value of African American responses to loss
3. Mourning bin Laden
Aeschylus, victory, and the democratic necessity of political humanism
4. Homecoming and reconstitution
nostalgia, mourning, and military return
5. Mourning as democratic resilience
going on together in the face of loss.