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The Post-Racial Limits of Memorialization

Toward a Political Sense of Mourning

Alfred Frankowski

The Post-Racial Limits of Memorialization: Toward a Political Sense of Mourning attempts 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.

Lexington Books

Pages: 138 • Trim: 6¼ x 9⅜

978-1-4985-0276-4 • Hardback • November 2015 • $107.00 • (£82.00)

978-1-4985-0278-8 • Paperback • July 2017 • $50.99 • (£39.00)

978-1-4985-0277-1 • eBook • November 2015 • $48.00 • (£37.00)

Series: Philosophy of Race

Subjects: Social Science / Discrimination & Race Relations, Social Science / Violence in Society

The Post-Racial Limits of Memorialization

Toward a Political Sense of Mourning

Hardback

Paperback

eBook

Summary

The Post-Racial Limits of Memorialization: Toward a Political Sense of Mourning attempts 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.

Details

Lexington Books

Pages: 138 • Trim: 6¼ x 9⅜

978-1-4985-0276-4 • Hardback • November 2015 • $107.00 • (£82.00)

978-1-4985-0278-8 • Paperback • July 2017 • $50.99 • (£39.00)

978-1-4985-0277-1 • eBook • November 2015 • $48.00 • (£37.00)

Series: Philosophy of Race

Subjects: Social Science / Discrimination & Race Relations, Social Science / Violence in Society

Author

Alfred Frankowski is assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy and African and African American Studies Program at Northeastern Illinois University.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Post-racial memory and the shadow of despair
Chapter 2: Fate and the post-racial limits of memorialization
Chapter 3: Sorrow as the longest memory of neglect
Chapter 4: The Cassandra complex
Chapter 5: The sublime and a political sense of mourning
Chapter 6: Mourning and philosophical pessimism within the post-racial context

Reviews

Frankowski's deeply important, original, and timely work introduces a political sense of mourning; it is also a work that mourns--not only all the Black lives lost to the pervasive anti-black violence of the past and of a forgetful present but also of a future condemned to repetition if we fail to critically assess how some of our so-called progressive and resistant practices of remembrance are tied to deadly forgetting…. The Post-Racial Limits of Memorialization's linkage among the aesthetic, the political, and practices of memory in a context of brutal anti-black violence and racism and its call for a critical engagement with current post-racial forgetful practices of remembering remains an original, deeply significant philosophical contribution that poses an equally deeply important moral challenge for us: that of seeing the strangeness and perversity of post-raciality in the midst of the present bloodshed of Black lives that indeed matter.
— Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy

This book will change the way we think about memory and forgetting in a “post-racial” society. It will also shape the way we analyze present and future iterations of post-racialism. Through brilliant analyses of the commemoration and erasure of black life and black death, Frankowski develops a conceptual language for engaging with some of the most pressing issues and events of our time, from the election of Barack Obama to the murder of Trayvon Martin, and beyond.
— Lisa Noelle Guenther, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Vanderbilt University

This is a timely and needed book. The author asks us to think reflectively about what will it mean to cast this period in the history of the United States as a post-racial moment. The violence experienced by black Americans undermines any notions of racial harmony and dims any post-racial glow. The memories we conjure of this period must not avoid the ugly truth of systemic racism. One could not ask for a clearer call for intellectual, political, and moral strength and courage to confront the horrible truths of our failure to do the right thing for all of our citizens; a provocative and insightful work.
— Bill E. Lawson, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, University of Memphis

The Post-Racial Limits of Memorialization

Toward a Political Sense of Mourning

Alfred Frankowski

The Post-Racial Limits of Memorialization

Toward a Political Sense of Mourning

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