Spontaneous memorials and contemporary modes of mourning in america

Abstract

ABSTRACTWho, and what, is worth mourning in the United States of America? Who and what “counts” in the American national imaginary and is, hence, deemed especially worthy of mourning and memorialization? Increasingly widespread commemorative practices such as roadside shrines, pregnancy loss memorials, organ donor memorials, and spontaneous memorials erected at sites of tragic and traumatic death—such as the shootings at Columbine High School in 1999—suggest new social and cultural understandings of who is valued as a person worth mourning and remembering in America. Challenging Freudian understandings of mourning as something to be “worked through” quickly and privately, new modes of mourning are public and continuous, embodying growing beliefs in the inseparability of life from death and the endless, although not pathological, presence of grief. Centering on spontaneous memorials, this essay considers what such seemingly impromptu public rituals of commemoration suggest about contemporary American attitudes regarding material culture, grief, death, and a national legacy of violence. It further considers the affective conditions, and possibilities, of grief in contemporary America.