The Post-Racial Limits of Memorialization: Toward a Political Sense of Mourning (Philosophy of Race)

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. "The...[book] explores how post-racial discourse, in general, and post-racial memory, specifically, operates as a context through which the memorialization of our history of antiblack violence and the production of news forms of antiblack violence are connected. Alfred Frankowski argues that aside from being symbolically meaningful, our post-racial context requires that memorials to a history of antiblack violence produces memory as a type of forgetting. By challenging many of the tenets of the critical turn in political philosophy and aesthetics, he defines the limitations to and the dangers of a politics of reconciliation in a post-racial context. This book makes the case for a political sense of mourning that requires that we deepen our understanding of how remembrance and resistance to oppression remain linked not only to what we want to remember but also to what continually goes silent in memory" -- Back cover The Post-Racial Limits of Memorialization: Toward a Political Sense of Mourning explores the problematic relationship between reconciliation and the continuance of violence and oppression. Frankowski engages with contemporary issues in the philosophy of race, African American philosophy, and critical race theory in connection with the aesthetics of German idealism, psychoanalysis, Frankfurt School critical theory, phenomenology, and post-structuralism