The Post-Racial Limits of Memorialization

Toward a Political Sense of Mourning

By (author) Alfred Frankowski

Publication date:

09 November 2015

Length of book:

150 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

ISBN-13: 9781498502764

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.

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

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.