Mourning in America

Public Examination ◽

The Public ◽

Black Lives Matter ◽

Racial Injustice ◽

The Public Sphere ◽

Greensboro Massacre

Recent years have brought public mourning to the heart of American politics, as exemplified by the spread and power of the Black Lives Matter movement, which has gained force through its identification of pervasive social injustices with individual losses. The deaths of Sandra Bland, Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, and so many others have brought private grief into the public sphere. The rhetoric and iconography of mourning has been noteworthy in Black Lives Matter protests, but this text argues that we have paid too little attention to the nature of social mourning—its relationship to private grief, its practices, and its pathologies and democratic possibilities. The book addresses significant and urgent questions about how citizens can mourn traumatic events and enduring injustices in their communities. The book offers a framework for analyzing the politics of mourning, drawing from psychoanalysis, Greek tragedy, and scholarly discourses on truth and reconciliation. This book connects these literatures to ongoing activism surrounding racial injustice, and it contextualizes Black Lives Matter in the broader politics of grief and recognition. The text also examines recent, grassroots-organized truth and reconciliation processes such as the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2004–006), which provided a public examination of the Greensboro Massacre of 1979—a deadly incident involving local members of the Communist Workers Party and the Ku Klux Klan.

Reconciliation and the secular

Social Compass ◽

10.1177/0037768619894510 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 67 (1) ◽

pp. 72-85

Author(s):

Carlos Colorado

Keyword(s):

Political Theory ◽

Charles Taylor ◽

Canadian Society ◽

Municipal Governments ◽

Political Actors ◽

The Public ◽

The Public Sphere

Using the lens of political theory, this article examines how the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) captures the ways in which Indigenous political actors operate in a spiritual key in the public sphere. It considers how the Calls to Action of the TRC – the implementation of which has received support from federal, provincial and municipal governments – imply a re-envisioning of Canadian society that cannot be accommodated within a rigidly ‘closed’ secularism, which sequesters ceremony and sacrality to the private sphere. The paper argues that the model of open secularism posited by Jocelyn Maclure and Charles Taylor, allows space for religion as a fundamental component of secular democratic order and participation, central to processes of Reconciliation in Canada.

Black Lives Matter and the Democratic Work of Mourning

Mourning in America ◽

10.7591/cornell/9781501704956.003.0006 ◽

2016 ◽

Author(s):

David W. McIvor

Keyword(s):

Social Movement ◽

Staten Island ◽

Black Lives Matter ◽

Work Of Mourning ◽

Greensboro Massacre ◽

Trayvon Martin

This afterword draws together the recent events in Baltimore, Staten Island, and Ferguson, and the larger Black Lives Matter social movement with the treatment given earlier of the Greensboro Massacre and the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission. For the poet Claudia Rankine, the Black Lives Matter protests represent not simply an effort to mourn the specific deaths of Freddie Gray, Trayvon Martin, or Michael Brown but an “attempt to keep mourning an open dynamic in our culture.” If this is the case, then such protests might be both illuminated and informed by the recent experiences in Greensboro and by the idea of a democratic work of mourning. The challenge of the democratic work of mourning is to locate and cultivate spaces and norms of public interaction that might erode some of the projections and pathologies attendant to ongoing relations of misrecognition. It is only from these spaces that feelings of impasse and despair might begin to gradually yield to a sense of democratic agency.

Reconciliation in the Public Domain

International Journal of Public Theology ◽

10.1163/15697320-12341414 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 9 (4) ◽

pp. 412-427 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Eddy Van der Borght

Keyword(s):

South Africa ◽

Public Domain ◽

Religious Symbol ◽

The Public ◽

The Church ◽

The Way

Reconciliation shifted in South Africa during the transition from being a contested idea in the church struggle to a notion proposed and rejected by the fighting parties and finally embraced by the two main political protagonists when they reached an agreement on the transition to a democratic order. This article analyses the layered meaning of the reconciliation concept within the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. On the basis of this description the questions that will be explored are whether reconciliation functioned as a religious symbol at the trc, and if so, in what way. In the conclusion, the way the concept of reconciliation itself was transformed due to the role it played in the transition in South Africa will be summarized and the consequences for theological research will be indicated.

‘I Was Those Thousands!’: Memory, Identity and Space in John Kani'sNothing But the Truth

Theatre Research International ◽

10.1017/s0307883306002513 ◽

2007 ◽

Vol 32 (1) ◽

pp. 68-84

Author(s):

SHANE GRAHAM

Keyword(s):

South Africa ◽

Social Space ◽

The Public ◽

Spatial Configurations

John Kani'sNothing But the Truth(2002) dramatizes South Africa's collective confrontation with its traumatic past – played out on the public stage most visibly in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearings – through the personal situation of Sipho Makhaya and his family. This essay analyses the obstacles Sipho and his daughter face in their attempts to negotiate new identities within the shifting social and physical geographies of post-apartheid South Africa. Identities in the apartheid era were rooted in specific places and socio-spatial configurations that are now being radically and rapidly transformed; Kani's play implies that this transitional moment in the country's history provides the opportunity to rewrite the codes that determine the ways that space is produced and used, and in the process to alter the ways that people form identities and memories in relation to both social space and other people.

The Politics of Mourning in America

Mourning in America ◽

10.7591/cornell/9781501704956.003.0001 ◽

2016 ◽

Author(s):

David W. McIvor

Keyword(s):

North Carolina ◽

Public Housing ◽

Public Space ◽

Full Range ◽

White Supremacists ◽

Greensboro Massacre ◽

Present Life

This chapter begins with a discussion of an event that came to be known as the Greensboro Massacre. On November 3, 1979, Ku Klux Klansmen disrupted a scheduled rally in a black public-housing neighborhood planned by the Communist Workers Party (CWP). Violent confrontations between the demonstrators and white supremacists resulted in the death of five CWP members and activists. It is argued that Greensboro dramatizes the full range of what could be described as the politics of mourning. The chapter then turns to the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission (GTRC), a grassroots-organized TRC that operated in Greensboro, North Carolina, from 2004 to 2006. The GTRC marked the creation of public space for dialogue and deliberation about a painful event in the city's history and the complicated pathways between that event and the present life of the community. The GTRC, when contextualized within a democratic theory of mourning, can provide a model for similar means and mechanisms of responding to the frustrations, blockages, and confusions within our con temporary politics of grief.

National Reconciliation through Public Hearings

10.5406/illinois/9780252039423.003.0004 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Pascha Bueno-Hansen

Keyword(s):

Full Potential ◽

The Public ◽

Public Hearings ◽

New Space ◽

And Gender ◽

National Reconciliation ◽

Selection Of

This chapter examines how the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (PTRC) turned from policy suggestions to the symbolic realm of public hearings as part of its efforts to construct and implement a new space of horizontal communication to facilitate the national reconciliation process. The PTRC public hearings aimed to build a new national narrative by giving voice to the victims/testimoniantes and educating the public on lesser-known aspects of the conflict utilizing a human rights framework. This chapter analyzes how procedural and representational issues hindered the full potential of the PTRC public hearings, including the selection of testimonies and the testimonies themselves that demonstrate the restricted qualities of both victimhood and motherhood. It also considers the politics of reception that characterizes the hearings and concludes by suggesting that careful attention to the workings of language, temporality, and gender representation could aid in overcoming the discrimination that impedes democracy and social harmony.

Media Practices and Painful Pasts: The Public Testimonial in Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission

Media International Australia ◽

10.1177/1329878x1314900114 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 149 (1) ◽

pp. 128-138 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Miranda J. Brady

Keyword(s):

First Nations ◽

Historical Record ◽

Aboriginal Peoples ◽

The Public ◽

Majority Culture ◽

Aboriginal Children ◽

Media Practices

From the 1870s through the 1990s, more than 150,000 First Nations, Inuit and Métis children were enrolled in government-funded, church-run Indian Residential Schools (IRS) in Canada. The schools reflected policies aimed at assimilating Aboriginal peoples into majority culture. Many Aboriginal children were forcibly removed from their homes and suffered physical, sexual and psychological abuses. As part of its Mandate, Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) collects testimonials from residential school survivors in various mediated forms to create a historical record. This article explores the TRC's public statement-gathering process and the ways in which media practices shape and guide testimonials. It argues that the TRC encourages particular survivor narratives as it signals to speakers that they should anticipate the norms and uses of media and narrative guidelines. However, there is a layer of meta-narrative common in TRC statements, suggesting resistance to and subversion of the process. This article considers the nuances of First Nations testimonials against the backdrop of storytelling traditions.

Post-Colonial Historical Practices

Scholarly and Research Communication ◽

10.22230/src.2021v12n1a393 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 12 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Andrew Nurse

Keyword(s):

Historical Research ◽

Historical Narratives ◽

Final Report ◽

Post Colonial ◽

The Past ◽

Black Lives Matter ◽

Historical Practices

This article suggests that historical practice in Canada is in the process of changing as a result of national and international developments, such as Black Lives Matter, Rhodes Must Fall, and the final report and recommendations of the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission. A key part of this process has been the reconsideration of Canadian narrative frameworks, but it also involves debates surrounding commemorative practices and other innovations in exhibition and display. This shift creates an opportunity to revisit the moral nature of historical narratives, Indigenous conceptions of the importance of the past, the authority of professional historians, and the place of community-engaged historical research. Cet article suggère que les pratiques historiques au Canada sont en train de changer sous l’effet de développements nationaux et internationaux tels que Black Lives Matter, Rhodes Must Fall, et le rapport final et les recommandations de la Commission de vérité et réconciliation du Canada. La reconsidération de cadres narratifs canadiens est une partie clé de ce processus, lequel comporte en outre des débats sur les pratiques commémoratives et sur d’autres innovations relatives aux expositions et installations. Ce changement présente l’occasion de réexaminer la nature morale des narrations historiques, les conceptions autochtones sur l’importance du passé, l’autorité des historiens professionnels, et la place d’une recherche historique qui soit engagée au niveau communautaire.

Framing the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Process in Canada: A Media Analysis of Settler Colonial Rhetoric and Colonial Denial, 2003-2016

Journal of Critical Race Inquiry ◽

10.24908/jcri.v7i2.13525 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 7 (2) ◽

pp. 46-73

Author(s):

Laura Mudde

Keyword(s):

Public Discourse ◽

Residential Schools ◽

Media Analysis ◽

Colonial History ◽

The Public ◽

Dominant Narratives ◽

The Impact

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of Canada helped to expose the trauma experienced by Indigenous peoples in Canada’s Indian Residential Schools (IRS), which were governed and run by government and church officials. In 2008, the Canadian government formally apologized for these residential schools. This apology was undermined, however, by a denial of colonial history by Canada at the G20 in 2009, revealing a rhetorical contradiction that is part of a public narrative of colonial denial. This paper examines the public discourse during and after the TRC process to understand the impact of negative discourses regarding the TRC and colonialism. This case study examines written content from five Canadian media platforms that covered the Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) and TRC process between 2003 and 2016. Drawing on concepts such as the white possessive, white rage, and white fragility, the aim of this paper is to unpack the cognitive dissonance of apology concurrent with the rhetoric of settler colonial denial. Findings from the discourse analysis substantiate the hypothesis that continued dominant narratives of settler colonialism align with representations of the TRC process. This limits the authentic potential for a formal apology to address the IRS legacy which perpetuates continued settler colonial realities in Canada.

Toppled Monuments and Black Lives Matter: Race, Gender, and Decolonization in the Public Space. An Interview with Charmaine A. Nelson

Atlantis: Critical Studies in Gender, Culture & Social Justice ◽

10.7202/1082012ar ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 42 (1) ◽

pp. 1-17

Author(s):

Christiana Abraham

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

Public Space ◽

The United States ◽

Generational Change ◽

Systemic Racism ◽

The Public ◽

Public Monuments ◽

Black Lives Matter ◽

Racial Injustice ◽

The Public Sphere

This paper discusses the recent backlash against public monuments spurred by Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests in North America and elsewhere following the killing by police of George Floyd, an unarmed African-American man in the United States. Since this event, protestors have taken to the streets to bring attention to police brutality, systemic racism, and racial injustice faced by Black and Indigenous people and people of colour in the United States, Canada, Great Britain and some European countries. In many of these protests, outraged citizens have torn down, toppled, or defaced monuments of well-known historic figures associated with colonialism, slavery, racism, and imperialism. Protestors have been demanding the removal of statues and monuments that symbolize slavery, colonial power, and systemic and historical racism. What makes these monuments problematic and what drives these deliberate and spectacular acts of defiance against these omnipresent monuments? Featuring an interview with art historian Charmaine A. Nelson, this article explores the meanings of these forceful, decolonial articulations at this moment. The interview addresses some complex questions related to monumentalization and the public sphere, symbolism and racial in/justice. In so doing, it suggests that monuments of the future need to be reimagined and redefined contemporaneously with shifting social knowledge and generational change.