Political Mourning

Reviews / Votes

"Heather Pool's philosophically rich, insightful, and moving book asks us to see political mourning as a practice of placing ordinary deaths in the service of political change and thus potentially binding us together in a practice of collective responsibility that acknowledges our complicity in those deaths. By the end of Political Mourning, one cannot help but feel that Pool has offered us something more beyond the cases she examines. She has provided us with nothing short of an ethical-political orientation for reckoning with the tragedy of our past. For anyone interested in the health of democracy, this is a book you must read!"
-Melvin Rogers, Associate Professor of Political Science at Brown University, and coeditor of African American Political Thought: A Collected History "With rigorous argumentation and compelling examples, Political Mourning shows how publics and political identities are formed by responses to loss. It is a stunning work of political theory that will appeal to the field as a whole. Pool makes an exciting contribution to the existing literature on mourning and politics. It is an essential text that all those working in this area will have to engage."
-Simon Stow, Marshall Professor of Government and American Studies at the College of William and Mary, and author of American Mourning: Tragedy, Democracy, and Resilience