The Post-Racial Limits of Memorialization

Toward a Political Sense of Mourning

Alfred Frankowski

• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781498502771
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Discrimination & Race Relations
• Index: Social Sciences

The Post-Racial Limits of Memorialization: Toward a Political Sense of Mourningattempts to show how post-racial discourse, in general, and post-racial memory, specifically, operates as a context through which the memorialization of anti-black violence and the production of new forms of this violence are connected. Alfred Frankowski argues that aside from being symbolically meaningful, the post-racial context requires that memorialization of anti-black violence in the past produces memory as a type of forgetting. By challenging many of tenants of the critical turn in political philosophy and aesthetics, he argues against a politics of reconciliation and for a political sense of mourning that amplifies the universality of violence embedded in our contemporary sensibility. He argues for a sense of mourning that requires that we deepen our understanding of how remembrance and resistance to oppression remain linked and necessitates a fluid and active reconfiguration relative to the context in which this oppression exists.

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• 1 Post-Racial Memory and the Shadow of Despair
• 2 Fate and the Post-Racial Limits of Memorialization
• 3 Sorrow as the Longest Memory of Neglect
• 4 The Cassandra Complex
• 5 The Sublime and a Political Sense of Mourning
• 6 Mourning and Philosophical Pessimism within the Post-Racial Context
• Bibliography
• Index