Culture and the Rites/Rights of Grief (original) (raw)

Although generally resented and deemed unfavourable for individuals, societies and nations, grief, grievance, and grieving, along with a complex list of epithets that could in various situations, under varying circumstances, accompany them – racial grief, political grievance, protracted grieving, chronic grief, traumatic, unresolved grievance – nevertheless occupy a significant place in culture and its manifestations in literature, art, history, science, or politics. Confused experiences of melancholia, grief, nostalgia, shame, anguish, hate, longing, and jealousy continue to permeate cultural productions across historical moments, literary epochs, and political sympathies. It is these veneers that the present volume endeavours to uncover and dismantle, thus – dissolve, or, assuming yet a different approach – assemble into larger entities exhibiting common patterns of formulaic imagining. The name Culture and the Rites/Rights of Grief comes with several emphases in mind – great impact is placed on attempts to explore questions of how globalization has affected modes of grieving, how it has altered the subjects/objects over which we grieve, and finally, how grievances have come to adopt the shape of ultimatums, sometimes escalating into forms of sabotage, schizophrenia, or even outright military conflict. The proposed collection aims to explore literary/cinematographic representations of the phenomena under investigation from a wide array of scholarly perspectives and attitudes, including articles dealing with the potential intersections of grievings and politics; grievings and history; grievings and globalization; grievings and (post)colonization/(post)colonialism; grievings and trans/multi-culturalism.