American Mourning
Tragedy, Democracy, Resilience

This insightful study employs public mourning as a lens to identify and address the shortcomings of American democracy.

Simon Stow (Author)

9781107158061, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 25 July 2017

244 pages
23.5 x 15.7 x 1.8 cm, 0.47 kg

'The dead are politically active, so Stow argues in this beautifully written book. Stories of loss and death shape living politics, and can even revitalize moribund democratic practices. Offering fresh interpretations of key political moments of mourning, from ancient Greece to the civil rights movement to post-9/11 politics, Stow defines mourning as a democratic practice that can generate collective commitment and inspire public responsibility. Rarely has a book on mourning and tragedy been so viscerally energizing. It should be required reading for anyone invested in democratic political thought today.' Elisabeth Anker, George Washington University and author of Orgies of Feeling: Melodrama and the Politics of Freedom

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.

Subject Areas: Political science & theory [JPA]