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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.
List 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
About the author
By Alfred Frankowski
Summary
This book explores the problematic relationship between reconciliation and the continuance of violence and oppression. Frankowski engages with contemporary issues in philosophy of race, African American philosophy, and critical race theory in connection with German idealism, psychoanalysis, critical theory, phenomenology, and post-structuralism.
