This chapter focuses on how witneᶊes to Civil War death made sense of their traumatic experience. The ethical challenge was one of recognition: to see and know the often-anonymous dead for who and what they were. Yet the dead were invariably integrated into familiar frameworks of meaning and into the conventions of aesthetics and rhetoric. Drawing on insights from phenomenology, pragmatism, Freudian psychology, and affect theory, the chapter shows that the psychological proceᶊes of abstraction and typification underlay a social logic of necrophilic dependency that both thrived on the dead and yet resisted their complex individuality. This problem is then connected to a long-standing cultural and historical melancholia whereby the Civil War dead have been internalized and eternalized as representational artifacts within a society that remains divided and ambivalent over the meaning of the war.
The Recovery and Commemoration of War Dead from Post-Colonial Contexts