Grief is typically portrayed as an individual experience that is a response to loss and provides the basis for personal growth; grief is something to work through, and, ideally, to benefit from, and represents a state change. But might it be possible to conceptualize grief of the future, a subjunctive grief that is based in speculation about change that brings that change into the present? The subjunctive invokes the wished for, the imagined, and the possible, and subjunctive grief serves to work through the experience of the future in the present. Focusing on debates around medical aid in dying and the parenting of a child with childhood psychosis, I consider grief in the subjunctive tense and how anticipation of change affects practices in the present. Attending to subjunctive grief provides an affective methodology that demonstrates interdependency and how conceptions of intimacy, love, and caregiving shape the experience of grief in the future tense.
Keyword: death
Review of Death beyond Disavowal: The Impossible Politics of Difference by Grace Kyungwon Hong (University of Minnesota Press)
As social issue fatigue threatens to isolate even the most robust justice scholars and activists, Hong asks us to hold our contemporary complexities in unresolved tension. She invites us back to the table, asking us to attend to how our lives and others’ deaths are related and to how neoliberalism works to redefine, and obfuscate, these connections. To understand how racialized, sexualized, and gendered differences are produced, Hong argues that exploring death, as well as the work of neoliberal technologies to erase marginalized memories of death, reveals the uneven distribution of precarity and violence. The book will benefit any seminar or study that seeks to parse the tangled complexity of contemporary oppressions in and through U.S. American political structures, as well as any who seek an exemplar of how to do so with academic rigor, exceptional feminist citation practices, and ethical elegance.
Review of In the Wake: On Blackness and Being by Christina Sharpe (Duke University Press)
Christina Sharpe’s “In the Wake: On Blackness and Being” addresses issues of citizenship, racial violence, and black mortality, meshing her personal experiences surrounding death and “the wake” with a sharp critique of cultural structures, as well as a reimagining of slavery, funeral, and death metaphors. In the wake of so many “ongoing state-sanctioned legal and extralegal murders of Black people,” Sharpe’s argument that black death is a foundational aspect of American citizenship encourages readers to acknowledge the antiblackness embedded in the past, present, and future of American (and by extension, Transatlantic) democracy (7). With the continued and encouraged proliferation of black death in the global diaspora, Sharpe’s study will, hopefully, usher in more woke scholarship that questions pervasive antiblackness.
Review of Necroculture by Charles Thorpe (Palgrave Macmillan)
Charles Thorpe’s Necroculture attempts to demonstrate that the variegated experiences of alienation under the technocratic culture of neoliberal capital are experiences tantamount to a culture of death. Thorpe suggests that the root of the necrophilia that defines contemporary capitalist culture is in the valuing of non-living objects over living human beings. In the alienation and replacement of imperfect human labor with automated dead labor and in a highly atomized consumer culture where social participation is mediated by commodity fetishism, the non-living are given priority over the living.