Loss

The Politics of Mourning

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Edited by David L. Eng and David Kazanjian, Judith Butler, Afterword

University of California Press

Due/Published December 2002, 543 pages, paper

ISBN 0520232364

Taking stock of a century of pervasive loss--of warfare, disease, and political strife--this book opens a new view on both the past and the future by considering "what is lost" in terms of "what remains." Such a perspective, these essays suggest, engages and reanimates history. Exploring the cultural and political implications of loss, the authors--political theorists, film and literary critics, museum curators, feminists, psychoanalysts, and AIDS activists--expose the humane and productive possibilities in the workings of witness, memory, and melancholy.

Among the sites of loss the authors revisit are slavery, apartheid, genocide, war, diaspora, migration, suicide, and disease. Their subjects range from the Irish Famine and the Ottoman slaughter of Armenians to the aftermath of the Vietnam War and apartheid in South Africa, problems of partial immigration and assimilation, AIDS, and the re-envisioning of leftist movements. In particular, Loss reveals how melancholia can lend meaning and force to notions of activism, ethics, and identity.

Contents

Illustrations
Preface

Introduction: Mourning Remains - David L. Eng and David Kazanjian

I. Bodily Remains
Returning the Body without Haunting: Mourning "Nai Phi" and the End of Revolution in Thailand - Rosalind C. Morris
Black Mo'nin' - Fred Moten
Ambiguities of Mourning: Law, Custom, and Testimony of Women before South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission - Mark Sanders
Catastrophic Mourning - Marc Nichanian
Between Genocide and Catastrophe - David Kazanjian and Marc Nichanian
Passing Shadows: Melancholic Nationality and Black Critical Publicity in Pauline E. Hopkins's Of One Blood - Dana Luciano
Melancholia and Moralism - Douglas Crimp

II. Spatial Remains
The Memory of Hunger - David Lloyd
Remains to Be Seen: Reading the Works of Dean Sameshima and Khanh Vo - Susette Min
Mourning Becomes Kitsch: The Aesthetics of Loss in Severo Sarduy's Cobra - Vilashini Cooppan
Theorizing the Loss of Land: Griqua Land Claims in Southern Africa, 1874-1998 - David Johnson
Left Melancholy - Charity Scribner

III. Ideal Remains
All Things Shining - Kaja Silverman
A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia - David L. Eng and Shinhee Han
Passing Away: The Unspeakable (Losses) of Postapartheid South Africa - Yvette Christianse
Ways of Not Seeing: (En)gendered Optics in Benjamin, Baudelaire, and Freud - Alys Eve Weinbaum
Legacies of Trauma, Legacies of Activism: ACT UP's Lesbians - Ann Cvetkovich
Resisting Left Melancholia - Wendy Brown

Afterword: After Loss, What Then? - Judith Butler

Contributors
Index