National Grief Research Articles

KARABAKH THEME IN AZERBAIJANI PROSE IN THE PERIOD OF INDEPENDENCE

The Karabakh theme, which is our destiny-laden issue, has formed the main line of the works of most of our writers, poets, playwrights and publicists since independence. Every person of word from time to time tried to fully revive our national grief, Karabakh, right up to the liberation of our lands from occupation. The novels “Dolu” by Agil Abbas, “Zengule” by Nushaba Mammadli, “Qara qan” by Fazil Guney, the “Qarabagh” trilogy by Sabir Ahmadli, the story “Esirler” by Elchin Huseynbeyli, the story “Shekil” by Sharif Aghayar are remembered as the best works written on the subject of Karabakh since independence. In the works we have mentioned, the Karabakh theme, the longing for the homeland have found a whole poetic solution. As it can be seen, in the period of about thirty years between Karabakh War I and Karabakh War II, in our literature, along with the Karabakh grief, the languor of the Motherland, the loss of land, the topic of irreconcilability has retained its relevance. If we say that war is the greatest crime against mankind, humanity, it may be an understatement. We can talk about the wounds it inflicted on people's lives for years and centuries. However, there are times in history when wars are inevitable.In particular, the struggles of the states to gain freedom and independence were often accompanied by wars in their lives. From this point of view, poets, prose writers, playwrights and publicists of different generations have always focused on the tragedy of our compatriots who have experienced a loss of land and become displaced and displaced in their homeland in literary works.

Intense impressions: Joseph R. Biden toward a 2020 national grief

By mid-May of 2020, the United States surpassed 100,000 lives lost to COVID-19. The nation was scrambling to make sense of the global pandemic amid the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Focusing on Biden’s pandemic-related speaking moments throughout the 2020 election, I attend to the way Biden lingers in the felt intensities of grief. With this, I illustrate how Biden’s articulations of grief rely on affective intensities which situate a personal grief in open relation to an invisible other, a reaching out, the towardness of which moves away from the particular and toward the singular collective—national grief. Utilizing affect theory, public feelings scholarship, and precedential expectations for presidential speech, I argue that Biden’s grief rhetoric, against the absence of any similar grief-related public address from Trump during this time, defines the emergence of an affective national body—a grieving public. This analysis weaves between notions of individual and collective loss and prompts wider questions of presidential responsibility in response to shared trauma.

Book of Mormon Theology—Anticipating the Future of a Discipline

Book of Mormon Theology—Anticipating the Future of a Discipline

When Personal and National Grief Unite: The Unique Case of the Death of King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand

The study aims to present the unique case of national grief following the death of the Thai King who is perceived as the father of the nation. Twenty faculty members and students at Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, reflected on their feelings and future concerns through narratives and drawings. Phenomenological analysis yielded that the national grieving melted into personal loss. Analysis of the drawings revealed two artistic themes: boundaries around the main image of the picture, and the minimalistic use of symbols and colors. The narratives and drawings were found to validate each other concerning the personal versus the national grief.

Empire of Hope: The Sentimental Politics of Japanese Decline by David Leheny

Reviewed by: Empire of Hope: The Sentimental Politics of Japanese Decline by David Leheny Eiko Maruko Siniawer (bio) Empire of Hope: The Sentimental Politics of Japanese Decline. By David Leheny. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 2018. xiv, 230 pages. $39.95. We have just begun to reckon with the last 30 years—how to understand and name what in conventional shorthand has been called the lost decades. Some scholars of contemporary Japan have taken to putting "lost decades" in quotation marks to acknowledge both the moniker's insufficiencies and [End Page 556] the lack of compelling alternatives. Others subtly perpetuate or even actively embrace the popular characterization of this period as one marked overwhelmingly by loss and decline. In this rendering, decline is a particular kind of loss—of a past assumed to be better than the present, often measured by stubbornly fixed yardsticks such as economic growth, marital status, and fertility rate. A prevailing and unchanging sense of malaise is assumed to be rooted in lived experience, with little clarity about what was lost, when, and by whom. With refreshing originality, Empire of Hope: The Sentimental Politics of Japanese Decline complicates simple narratives of loss. David Leheny illustrates how expressions of decline and loss were laced with the rhetoric of hope, if not so confident as to be audacious, then substantive enough to affirm that the stories of postbubble Japan have not only been of doom and gloom. He gives examples of narratives that look ahead to a future, one in which, and over which, Japan has agency to become something better. The very imagination of a future that is somehow good challenges the notion that the ability to see beyond the present and to believe in progress has been utterly lost. In pointing out how such narratives have been tinged with feelings of hope, Leheny offers more than valuable observations about the articulation of national identity in contemporary Japan. The book does something much more innovative: it examines the intersection of narratives and emotion in Japanese political life. Empire of Hope is about how emotions operate in politics: not how they themselves are a motivating force, but how representations of emotions are important elements in the creation of stories that a nation tells itself about itself. The book shows how political ideas, claims, and goals gain traction when they appeal to what is presented as national emotion and are connected to what is presented as a shared national narrative. Japan's shared national narrative, argues Leheny, is that the country's earlier, extended period of economic growth was brought about by "collective national effort" (p. 11). In a time of prolonged economic stagnation, the more optimistic prognoses about Japan's future have stemmed from the belief that the country might once again come together to realize "national success" (p. 12). Each of five body chapters focuses on one case study to forge a distinct piece of the book's fundamental argument about the inextricability of emotions and narratives. The first takes up the immediate aftermath of the tragic collision of the U.S. nuclear submarine USS Greeneville with the Ehime Maru, a Japanese fisheries training boat, in 2001. Examining how the Japanese and U.S. governments portrayed feelings about death in relation to the question of whether the boat should be raised to recover the bodies, the chapter illustrates how the description of national emotions was used to preserve a shared story about the triumph of cooperation and mutuality over [End Page 557] cultural difference in the U.S.-Japan relationship. In this chapter that is more about international politics than any other, Leheny introduces an important point about how national emotion and narrative can defuse the explicitly and uncomfortably political, in this case, tensions and resentments about the power differential between the United States and Japan. National emotion and narrative are also shown to elide the complexities of individuals' emotions. In the negotiations over the fate of the Ehime Maru, the construction of a national grief that could be adequately addressed through concrete action was incongruent with the grief of victims' families which could not be so neatly resolved. The four subsequent chapters are not concerned with...

Domestic Trauma and Imperial Pessimism: The Crisis at Home in Charles Dickens’s <em>Dombey and Son</em>

In “Domestic Trauma and Imperial Pessimism: The Crisis At Home in Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son,” Katherine Ostdiek discusses Dickens’s representation of violence, grief, and recovery within the Victorian home as a pre-Freudian example of trauma. This comparison not only demonstrates the importance of trauma studies in the nineteenth-century, but more importantly, it thematically focuses empathy for the traumatized on the home. In this novel, Dickens dismisses topics related to the financial and social crises of mid-century Britain in favor of domestic themes that emphasize an idealized structure of the Victorian family. Through her use of trauma theory and cultural studies, Ostdiek examines Dickens’s use of non-linear narrative and evocation of empathy from his readers in order to represent trauma and allow readers to process national grief.

Breaking the Frame: Amy Waldman's The Submission and 9/11 Memorials

This essay analyzes how various memorials create physical, temporal, and literary space for reflection about the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. As a New York Times reporter, Amy Waldman contributed in 2001 to the “Portraits of Grief” before publishing in 2011 The Submission, her novel about the memorial-building process. Juxtaposing Waldman's fiction and journalism with the Reflecting Absence memorial in New York and Columbia University's 9/11 Oral History Project, the essay explores how memorialization of the attacks can build space for democratic debate rather than just a public monument to the idea of national grief.

Towards a Poetics of Racial Trauma: Lyric Hybridity in Claudia Rankine'sCitizen

The longevity of the lyric belies persisting difficulties in terms of its definition and categorization, particularly given the form's evolution in the face of philosophical, sociopolitical and cultural transformations. In Claudia Rankine'sCitizen, the lyric is powerfully refashioned in response to the historical and contemporary tribulations of being a black citizen in America. Rankine's keen awareness of how linguistic injury caused by microaggressions registers in the body leads her to an adoption andadaptationof the lyric form, withCitizenaptly subtitled “An American Lyric.”Citizenis an urgent and timely book that sustains America's conversation on race and racial injustice on a level of national grief, even as Rankine brings it to the level of personal intimacy by asking, “How do you make a body accountable for its language, its positioning?” I contend thatCitizenis a work that extends the lyric's possibilities through creating a hybrid text containing lyric essays, photography, public art and video scripts, which are juxtaposed for intertextual and polyphonic effects. I argue that Rankine uses lyric hybridity to create a poetics of racial trauma that meditates on the effects of racial injustice as it manifests in the bodies of traumatized individuals. Lyric hybridity appears crucial to Rankine's project, since it allows for complex subjectivity and intimate address amidst a clarity of language that enables the reader to perceive how we easily we fail one another in our daily pursuit of relationality, community and citizenship.

The Norwegian 9/11: In the Church Without a Bible

The article identifies roles and conditions for the Bible within modern politics in the West. By comparing the official Norwegian response to the terror attack in Oslo July 22, 2011, with the similar response in the US on September 11, 2001, it is explained why the Bible is nearly absent in the official discourse of Norwegian Prime Ministers. While religion resurfaced in the process of national recuperation with the Cathedral of Oslo as a center for mass ritualization and national grief, the biblical legacy played no part in the Prime Minister's speech. The primary political leader of the Norwegian state has rarely bolstered his argument with the Bible, although this state has officially adhered to a Protestant confession from its Constitution in 1814. The Liberal Bible that appears to be operative in US presidential discourse is not playing a major role on a comparable political level in Norway.

Introducing Chaplaincy to Japanese Society

This paper examines the meaning of the introduction of Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) to Japan, as an example of one of the religious activities accepted in public space in a secular Japanese society. For over half a century, Christian clerics have tried to introduce the idea of chaplaincy to Japan, and Buddhists have attempted to develop a Buddhist form of hospice palliative care. The Japan Society for Spiritual Care was established in 2007 and began an accreditation process of ecumenically designed “spiritual caregivers,” bringing interested parties together in Japan for education, peer support, and continuous training in spiritual care. The outpouring of national grief in response to accidents or natural disasters encouraged sponsors to create CPE training institutions at some universities. Challenging the Japanese understanding of the separation of religion and state, the introduction of chaplaincy can be seen as a case of religious practice that is accepted in public space.

Dreamers' Nightmare: The Melancholia of the Taiwanese Centennial Celebration

Dreamers is a musical written by Lai Sheng-Chuan and directed by Ding Nai-Cheng and Lu Poshen to celebrate the centennial of the founding of the Republic of China on 10 October 1911. With us $7 million in government funds, the musical delivered the government's message of Taiwan's economy's strength. However, Dreamers drew criticism from Taiwanese intellectuals for its arguable interpretation of the origin of Taiwan and its failure to address imperative social issues. Employing Sigmund Freud's and Anne Anlin Cheng's model of melancholia, I examine the title, the story, and the staging of Dreamers to see how this musical discloses that Taiwan, on the one hand, desires an independent national subjectivity and, on the other hand, refuses to fully grieve and let go of the loss of China. The musical Dreamers teases out the complex social etiology behind the phenomenon of national grief and injury.

Lest we forget: the Kapooka Tragedy 1945

This article explores an incident that raises questions relating to the making and unmaking of history, heritage and social memory. It also points to the role of the historian in unravelling forgotten pasts. On 21 May 1945, at the Royal Australian Engineers Training Camp (RAETC) Kapooka near the provincial New South Wales city of Wagga Wagga, twenty‐four ‘sappers’ or engineers, and their two ‘other ranks’ trainers, were killed in a demolitions training exercise gone terribly wrong. The accident remains the largest in Australian army history. However, following a brief flurry of national grief public memory of the tragedy soon slipped into historical obscurity. The article narrates the Kapooka story and then reflects on its role as an exemplar of how a society makes, unmakes or forgets its past.

Interiors and Interiority in the Ornamental Dairy Tradition

the sudden death of England’s Queen Mary ii (1662–94) in December 1694 elicited an outpouring of national grief that manifested itself in massive funeral processions and a splendid mausoleum designed by Christopher Wren. In his eulogy at her funeral, Thomas Tenison, Archbishop of Canterbury, praised Mary for being an “incomparable wife” to William iii, and extolled her charity, economy, and humility: “How good, how happy a life was this! ... not of vain pleasure, and soft and unprofitable ease, but of true usefulness and comfort.”1 Later writers similarly celebrated Mary’s domestic virtues—recalling, for instance, how she spent her days practising needlework with her ladies. She was also praised for her self-restraint. In the third edition of King William’s Royal Diary (1705), which contained a section on “The character of his royal consort, Queen Mary ii,” the anonymous author points out that, if the queen had indulged at times in projects of “Architecture and Gardenage,” “she had no other inclinations besides this, to any Diversions that were expensive; and since this employed many Hands, she was pleased to say, That she hoped it would be forgiven her.” “As to the Sobriety which relates to the Palate,” the author continues, she “was so

Elvis Presley and the Politics of Popular Memory

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Lonely Life Ends on Presley Boulevard, blared the headline of a late-summer special edition of the Memphis Press-Scimitar. is Dead. Much like his explosive ascent nearly a generation earlier, Presley's untimely demise on August 16, 1977, left many all shook up. Grieving fans by the thousands trekked to Memphis for the wake and funeral; millions more paid their respects by besieging radio stations and record stores, listening to songs and looking for Presley products. Commenting on the mass anguish, one veteran columnist recalled that he had witnessed many instances of public mourning since the assassination of President John Kennedy, but nothing has equaled the present national grief. The mainstream media, unprepared for the passionate and ubiquitous response that Presley's passing engendered, resorted to repeating by rote the distinctive American tale of an anonymous truck driver whose unrestrained performance style and meteoric rise to fame flustered the less than frenzied fifties. A stock script asserted that Presley symbolized the twentieth-century version of the heroic pioneer blazing trails into an unknown frontier, an unlikely rebel who set the stage for a countercultural insurgency that later would shake the sixties. one editorial aptly extolled, Elvis really started something. (1) For many African Americans, however, was less about innovation and more about continuation, namely the perpetual exploitation and misappropriation of black labor and artistry. the Chicago Defender noted, When Presley breathed his last breath and the press hailed him as the 'King of Rock,' 01' Man River cried out, 'Naw he ain't! My friend Chuck Berry is the of Rock. Presley was merely a Prince who profited from the royal talent of a sovereign ruler vested with tremendous creativity. Had Berry been white, he could have rightly taken [Presley's] throne and worn his crown well.' (2) The issue of race certainly has cast a large shadow on the contributions of one of the most successful recording artists in the history of the music industry; Presley's legacy undoubtedly is a contested one. But then again, the man himself often seemed downright conflicted as to who or what he was. Dubbed the Hillbilly Cat, the King of Western Bop, the Bopping Hillbilly, and a white nigger by contemporaries, the culturally schizophrenic Presley routinely erased artistic and societal borders, defying easy categorization. Was he a genuine rhythm and blues enthusiast appreciative of black talent and equality? Or was he a racist redneck who profited at the expense of the authentic African American performers he in fact despised? The answers depend on who is responding, and the responses readily recall the insight of two critics writing in 1958, who surely did not anticipate the longevity of their counsel: As a subject for polemic, Presley has few peers. (3) a subject for historians, remains intriguing, at least in part because he negotiated the racial boundaries of his era. While his excursions without question were unsystematic, imperfect, and apolitical, they nevertheless threatened the racial status quo. By implicitly advocating that working-class African Americans and working-class whites might have had more in common than not, Presley's crossing of the color line undermined the myths and stereotypes that sustained Jim Crow segregation. with other controversial episodes in the southern past, however, differing perceptions based on divergent racial and class realities have predisposed how people remember the singer's societal transgressions. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Memories of Presley within the mainstream frequently consist of condescending characterizations. In a nation that valued upward mobility and cultural progression, remained a proletarian provincial, an exotic and repulsive Other. …

Elton's Crooning, England's Dreaming

Elton’s Crooning, England’s Dreaming Paul Gilroy (bio) My antipathy to the British monarchy and understanding of their power have been leavened over the years by heavy doses of The Sex Pistols’ “God Save The Queen”. I periodically commemorate that long-vanished undercurrent of resistance to the 1977 Royal Jubilee and, as the years go by, listen with greater and greater pleasure to Johnny Rotten’s joyfully nihilistic assault on the pathologies of England’s interminable dreaming. Formed by such irreverent popular forces, it’s hard not to see the death of princess Diana as a freak tide in the relentless cultural flow of national necropolitanism. Though our bright and shining leader Tony Blair, who plays the handsome prince in this sorry tale, has applied his ideological caress to the lips of the unconscious form of the princess, the spell of our chronic crisis has not been broken by this national tragedy. No matter how many times the word modern is repeated in the catechism of New Labour, the hopelessly morbid slumber of our decline remains deeper than ever. We have been lulled out of consciousness by the strange sickly sound of Elton crooning and the popular response to Diana’s loss puts us in the eighteenth rather than the twenty-first century. It seems cruelly absurd to argue that Britain has become new country overnight thanks to the gentle, wholesome force of what some people been calling “the floral revolution”. The sight of respected leftist and feminist commentators falling over themselves in a sentimental rapture has been especially depressing. They have tried to re-invent Diana so that she appears integral to the political projects of feminism and republicanism but this has been driven by the obligation to redeem their own records of dissent in the new circumstances represented by the Labour victory. Diana provided a welcome means to mark their journey from the margins back towards the core of cultural life. Her confused and confusing crowd of celebrants, worshippers and mourners had to be affirmed because it gave a belated repudiation to the idea that there was such a thing as society after all. Here was another Britain, decent, dignified and tear-stained. For many radicals, national grief was read as constitutionally opposed to the inhumane workings of market capitalism. Trivial theories of hegemony have sprouted. They saw the outpouring of that grief as opening a window onto novel democratic possibilities and, even more bizarrely, as compelling evidence of progress towards a specifically feminist, emotional maturity to which, in death Diana some how gave birth. It is safe, we are told, to be English nationalists now. A quiet carnival has re-decorated the ship of state: Laura Ashley pastels and chintz over knackered battleship grey. Make no mistake, the institution of the monarchy is if anything, in a stronger position now than it was before. Tony Blair has commandeered it and created a new wider platform for himself that made the saturnalia of Diana’s loss continuous with the brighter national moods of his presidential victory last May. These days, you can hear Labour hacks justifying existing levels of military spending on the grounds that our post-Diana army (re-equipped in flowery designer camouflage suits?) can be deployed to clear away land-mines. It is a measure of our desperate predicament to say that there is even a good side of this disaggregation of militarism. The mythical togetherness of the Blitz and the Battle of Britain are likely to be displaced by a new folk memory of communal belonging. Where did you stand to watch the coffin pass? Where did you place your poem, teddy-bear or posy? The death of the people’s Princess flushed out “the people” as a political and historical agent for the first time since our war with Argentina. It is therefore fruitful to compare the character of those patriotic moments, the first of which cemented the power of Mrs. Thatcher while the second has taken Prince Tony to heights of popularity that cannot be sustained. Another interesting story flickered briefly in the British press once the Diana’s blazing trail had begun to fade. It seems that Rupert Murdoch, unsure...

Responding to national grief: memorial sermons on the famous in Britain 1800-1914

This paper is founded on the presumption, supported at the outset by some illustrative evidence, that public reactions to the deaths of prominent people provide revealing insights into wider cultural and religious attitudes to death. During the period under consideration the deaths and funerals of individuals such as Princess Charlotte (1817), the Duke of Wellington (1852), the Prince Consort (1861) and Queen Victoria (1901) were marked by services in numerous churches throughout Britain, and the sermons preached on these occasions provide the source material for this study. The views of death apparent showed considerable diversity. At least in the earlier part of the period there was no taboo against critical comments on the deceased. The idealization of the deathbed was the exception rather than the rule, and there was a wide variety of teaching regarding the afterlife. The deaths of the famous were also significant in that they stimulated awareness of national community, sometimes through celebrating and recalling past eras and achievements; sometimes through perceived national accountability to God; sometimes through idealization of the power of human sympathy; sometimes through stress on the inclusiveness and universality of national grief.

Responding to national grief: memorial sermons on the famous in Britain 1800-1914

This paper is founded on the presumption, supported at the outset by some illustrative evidence, that public reactions to the deaths of prominent people provide revealing insights into wider cultural and religious attitudes to death. During the period under consideration the deaths and funerals of individuals such as Princess Charlotte (1817), the Duke of Wellington (1852), the Prince Consort (1861) and Queen Victoria (1901) were marked by services in numerous churches throughout Britain, and the sermons preached on these occasions provide the source material for this study. The views of death apparent showed considerable diversity. At least in the earlier part of the period there was no taboo against critical comments on the deceased. The idealization of the deathbed was the exception rather than the rule, and there was a wide variety of teaching regarding the afterlife. The deaths of the famous were also significant in that they stimulated awareness of national community, sometimes through celebrating a...