Amazing Grief: African American Mourning and Contemporary Black Activism

Abstract

From slave rebellions to the fight for civil rights to recent protests against police violence, how black communities in the United States have struggled to remember, honor, and avenge the dead has profoundly influenced black political life. "Amazing Grief: African American Mourning and Contemporary Black Activism" demonstrates the complex and contested ways acts of public grief have shaped, and been shaped by, black activism, with particular focus on Black Lives Matter (BLM). By examining eulogies, street memorials, the activism of bereaved mothers, and invocations of the dead within electoral politics, this project shows how BLM embodies a radical politics of grief that stands within a long tradition of African American mourning. The first chapter challenges the ideologies of Afropessimism and black liberalism, both of which articulate stories of loss that stifle the more transformative dimensions of black politics. The last three chapters examine the Charleston Massacre, Michael Brown’s street memorial, and the Mothers of the Movement during the 2016 presidential election. Taken together, the dissertation charts a geography of grief - from the church to the street to the ballot - that situates African American mourning within an expansive terrain of contemporary black freedom struggle.