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 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.

Table 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 :
Alfred Frankowski is assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy and African and African American Studies Program at Northeastern Illinois University.

Review :
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. This book will change the way we think about memory and forgetting in a “post-racial” society. It will also shape the way we analyze present and future iterations of post-racialism. Through brilliant analyses of the commemoration and erasure of black life and black death, Frankowski develops a conceptual language for engaging with some of the most pressing issues and events of our time, from the election of Barack Obama to the murder of Trayvon Martin, and beyond. This is a timely and needed book. The author asks us to think reflectively about what will it mean to cast this period in the history of the United States as a post-racial moment. The violence experienced by black Americans undermines any notions of racial harmony and dims any post-racial glow. The memories we conjure of this period must not avoid the ugly truth of systemic racism. One could not ask for a clearer call for intellectual, political, and moral strength and courage to confront the horrible truths of our failure to do the right thing for all of our citizens; a provocative and insightful work.