Benjamin Nienass: "Grief and Political Transformation"

"Grief and Political Transformation"

Benjamin Nienass

Grief is often portrayed as a decidedly individual experience. However, even individual processes of mourning are firmly situated in specific social and political contexts. This link between grief and politics becomes even more explicit when losses are instrumentalized to bolster specific political ends like national loyalty. Public expressions of grief have also played a prominent role in struggles for social justice and political change, from Black Lives Matter and contestations over border deaths to anti-war activism. In those cases, activists challenge the ideological boundaries of "grievability" (Judith Butler), thereby opening up new questions about belonging, responsibility and implication. This talk reflects on the role public mourning can play in sustaining and confronting ideologies, with a specific focus on the relationship between grief and political transformation in debates over border deaths in Europe and the United States. Different conceptualizations of public grief - rooted in different psychoanalytical traditions - will be related to different temporal registers and horizons, from melancholic attachments to the past, to narratives of “overcoming” and progress, to broader challenges to our linear conceptions of time.

Bio

Benjamin Nienass is Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University. His research on the politics of memory in Germany, the United States, and Mexico has appeared in The Review of Politics, Politics and Society, the German Studies Review, the Latin American Research Review, Memory Studies, Social Research, Current History, Globalizations, and many other journals. He is also the co-editor of Silence, Screen, and Spectacle: Rethinking Social Memory in the Age of Information (2017), Las luchas por la memoria contra las violencias en México (2023) as well as the co-editor of several special journal issues, most recently “Myths of Innocence in German Public Memory” in German Politics and Society (2021). He was previously a Fellow at the Fondation Maison des sciences de l'homme in Paris and at the Humanities Center of the University of Rochester.