American Mourning : Tragedy, Democracy, Resilience

Concerned with tragedy, loss, and resilience, American Mourning will be of interest to political theorists, and scholars/students in American studies, history, race, rhetoric, philosophy, theater, and international relations. The book considers public mourning as a lens for analyzing and addressing the problems of contemporary democratic life and politics.

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.