National Mourning Research Articles

Fashion and Politics, The Politics of Fashion: Józef Simmler’s Portrait of Emilia Włodkowska, Society Portrait and Haute Couture

The article proposes an analytical approach tuned to 19th-century society portraiture and tests it on Józef Simmler’s Portrait of Emilia Włodkowska (1865, National Museum in Warsaw). The pictured ball gown was likely by Worth and presented as being worn in Paris rather than in Warsaw to respect the politically-motivated Polish national mourning (1861–1866), culminating during the January Uprising (1863–1864) against Russian rule, that precluded organizing and attending balls at home. The portrait was an act of public performance—and indeed it was publicly exhibited at the artist’s posthumous exhibition in Warsaw in 1868. Its staging and costuming reflected the sitter’s particular agenda fine-tuned to multifarious current contexts: she promoted her Warsaw fashion house and herself as a respectable society lady and competent agent of French fashion in the period of political turmoil and resultant expectations concerning Polish women’s dress and conduct. The portrait showcases Simmler’s juste milieu approach and illustrates a very current shift in the fashionable female silhouette, advocated by Worth, while referencing the dress and artistic tradition of the 17th and 18th centuries and drawing inspiration from the new medium of photography.

Czech Republic: Political Developments and Data in 2023

AbstractThe 2023 Czech presidential elections, characterized by high turnout and the victory of retired General Petr Pavel in a run‐off against former Prime Minister Andrej Babiš, marked a significant shift in the country's political landscape. These elections were marked by intense debates on candidates’ backgrounds and foreign policy orientations, highlighting voters’ preference for pro‐Western ideals. Meanwhile, the Cabinet of Petr Fiala witnessed four ministerial changes affecting the Ministry of the Environment, the Ministry for European Affairs, the Ministry of Education, Youth, and Sport, and the Ministry of Agriculture. Several important legislative changes occurred in 2023. Notably, the pension amendment incited robust debate and opposition activity. Furthermore, the government's consolidation package, aimed at economic stabilization and public budget reduction, sparked protests, reflecting broader societal concerns over funding and labor conditions in schools and hospitals. The year ended with national mourning following a tragic mass shooting at Charles University in Prague.

Why Did Cyprian Norwid Wear the konfederatka?: The Crime of Wearing a Black Dress

After the partitions of Poland between Russia, Prussia and Austria, Poland disappeared from the maps of Europe. The failure of the November Uprising of 1830 against the Russian occupiers led to harsh repressions imposed by the tzarist rule on the Polish people. Many insurgents were imprisoned, or sentenced to death, or forcibly deported to Siberia, their manors and estates were confiscated, and family members were persecuted. As a result, the revival of patriotic attitudes among the subsequent generation in the Kingdom of Poland led to outburst of opposition to the imposed Russian authorities. On the 30th anniversary of the Battle of Grochów, the citizens of Warsaw organized a demonstration in the Castle Square. The Russian soldiers attacked the protesters and killed five. Around that time, a national mourning was secretly announced, and women decided to wear black dresses and silver or bone jewellery in the form of a cross or a crown of thorns, thus sending a hidden message to compatriots and to the Russians. As a result, the decree was issued against the black garments, stating that only personal mourning was allowed based on an official certificate of a family member’s death, otherwise the mourners could be imprisoned. Therefore, other colours, white and violet were introduced as a sign of resistance as well. Black dresses and the konfederatka caps meant not just fashion during the years of the January Uprising; they gained recognition as a hidden patriotic code among Poles living both in the occupied country and in emigration. Poet-emigrant Cyprian Norwid explained the importance of wearing the special type of men’s headgear, referring to the great history of his enslaved country and arguing that symbols and power of thought are powerful weapons in the modern world.

Toward the transnational memory of Holodomor: The famine commemorative genre and the Ukrainian diaspora

This article traces the emergence of the public memory of Holodomor by focusing on the history of Famine commemorations outside of the Soviet Union from 1933 till 1983. By following Jeffrey K. Olick’s call for a dialogical analysis of memory genres, it attempts to unravel the complex cultural mechanism through which commemorations of the Famine evolved not only through their interactions with immediate political context but also in response to earlier commemorations. Two Famine commemorative genres informed this process: that of national mourning and that of anti-Soviet protest. Drawing on my multi-sited and multilingual research, this article argues that the process of creating the public memory of the Holodomor has been transnational, multidirectional, and path-dependent. The framing of the Famine as the Holodomor, a genocide against Ukrainians, was an outcome of negotiations that occurred across time and space. Ukrainian diaspora members, it is further argued, played a prominent role in this process.

Power and ritual in the city: Mourning and political juncture at Bangkok's Sanam Luang

This article argues that ritual remains a potent instrument for the generation of national identity and citizenship in Southeast Asia. We focus our analysis on the ritualisation of public space in Bangkok, Thailand, under the military-led government of General Prayut Chan-o-cha. The authors provide an ethnographic analysis of Sanam Luang, arguing that between 2016 and 2017 funeral rites held in this public space would reanimate it as a catalyst of national unification. As in other cases of ritual in public space, however, the intensified securitisation and control over national mourning for King Bhumibol by the military government, gave way to a range of reactions, including increased protests and criticism of the ruling government and Thailand's lesé-majesté laws by a predominantly youth-led movement in 2020.

#MournHub and @GrieveWatch: Mediating monarchy and mourning in the digital age

Queen Elizabeth II's death in September 2022 prompted a predictable saturation of representations across all UK media. A lot of ‘traditional’ media, like the BBC, largely assumed, and hence attempted to reproduce, a hegemonic and unified response of national mourning. But some social media representations exposed a struggle over meaning, displaying ambivalence or even outright negativity towards the British monarchy and ‘national’ mourning practices. This article uses #MournHub and @GrieveWatch as two critical case studies to explore the complex meanings of the Queen's death across different communities and spaces. Doing so, this article illuminates the ambivalences of ‘national’ mourning, the intersectionality of class, race and national identity in shaping the tenor of people's responses to the Queen's death, the commercialisation and corporatisation of memorialising death and nationhood, the changing forms of royal mediations, and the careful staging of royal events.

Viceregalism: The Crown as Head of State in Political Crises in the Postwar Commonwealth. By H. Kumarasingham (ed.)

Cancelled hospital appointments, postponed Royal Mail and rail strikes, suspended sporting events and closed banks due to national mourning—the death of Queen Elizabeth II on 8 September 2022 had significant consequences for public life in the UK and beyond. With the disruption of the work of the parliaments of her realms (including the four parliaments of the UK and other parts of the Commonwealth such as Australia), they also reached the political arena, reminding the public that in the British constitutional monarchy the Crown is ‘an integral part of the institution of Parliament’, indeed the ‘oldest part of the system of government in this country’, as the UK Parliament’s website puts it.1 Published well before the events of September 2022, H. Kumarasingham’s new book, which appeared in the Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series, is devoted to the political functions of the Crown in the post-war Commonwealth. It is an important volume because the politics of and with the Crown are still among the most under-researched areas in political science, but also in history. This is hardly understandable in light of central monarchical reserve powers and the empirically describable politicizations of the monarchy from various sides. The study of the political functions and politicizations of the Crown also offers insight into the functions of modern constitutional monarchies as well as into the political culture and practices of Commonwealth member states. With such a perspective, it would be possible—and, in fact, necessary—to reinscribe the monarchy into the contemporary political history of Britain and beyond, in which it has a place, but which scholarly research has so far not illuminated enough. Significantly complementing existing, older constitutional law studies, Kumarasingham’s book now makes a substantial contribution to this. Although it is not explicitly oriented towards the new political history, the cultural history of politics or a history of political practices, it contributes significantly to these current fields of research with regard to the contemporary Commonwealth.

National Mourning: The First Norwegian Sports Boycott in 1905

One of the early sports boycotts in modern times occurred in 1905 as a reaction to the stalled negotiations concerning separate consulates for Norway, then in political union with the mightier country Sweden. The Committee for the representation of Norwegian athletes in the winter sporting contest Nordic Games in Stockholm, Sweden, decided to quit its work because of the sorrow which was said to be felt throughout Norway. To a considerable extent, the daily newspapers and weekly sports magazines defined the public opinion in this context. The editors, especially in the capital Kristiania (now Oslo), related the right to set up Norwegian consulates to the fundamental question of national sovereignty as well as to the democratic aspirations of the Norwegian people, thereby most probably inducing the Committee to terminate its work. Although the decision was a break from the paradigm of not mixing sport and politics, neither the Committee, nor the publications, nor most athletes voicing their opinions, presented the boycott as a kind of threat or direct political demonstration against Sweden. It became a question of morality and identity. The boycott in 1905 may be perceived as a demonstration of what mattered most – for the Norwegians themselves.

Are enslaved African Americans buried at Mount Harmon plantation? Space and reflection for national mourning and memorialising

ABSTRACT Are plantations places where visitors can mourn enslaved Africans/African Americans? In this article, the author traces her time as the Historical Consultant on a project centred on a presumed graveyard for enslaved African Americans that brought forth disparate views and understandings on African American mourning and burial spaces. Over the course of the two-year research, what transpired was how the Friends of Mount Harmon (non-profit who took ownership of the property in 1997) grappled to reckon with their identity as a southern plantation and how this identity shaped and ultimately hindered a fuller more complex understanding of a graveyard for enslaved Africans/African Americans. Ultimately, the author describes the process of coming to understand the graveyard that also provided a new narrative of reimaging it as a site of mourning.

Public Discourse and Private Sentiment: Ritual Controversies, Ritual Authority, and Political Succession in Ming and Chosŏn

In this article I explore the issue of ritual authority in the Ming and Chosŏn through a comparison of the Great Rites Controversy and the Injo Rites Dispute which occurred a century later. I argue that Ming Taizu created an alternative source of ritual authority predicated on natural emotions through his changing of the national mourning code. By utilizing this source of ritual authority, Shizong and his allies undermined the ritual authority of the classical texts and Neo-Confucian commentaries cited by their opponents and in doing so not only won the conflict but also increased the ritual authority of the emperor vis-à-vis the bureaucracy. In Chosŏn, on the other hand, both sides argued along Song Neo-Confucian lines and rejected Ming ritual authority. Nonetheless, the lack of an alternate source of ritual authority that King Injo could rely upon led him to turn to the Ming for support in a calculated political move to end the dispute in his favor.

The Limits of Human Rights Limits

Rescuing Human Rights: A Radically Moderate Approach (Rescuing) was published shortly before the outbreak in 2020 of the novel coronavirus and its myriad human rights and class issues regarding equality, discrimination, health, and labor rights of people of color. This was also prior to the concurrent public murder of George Floyd as an unarmed Black man by the Minneapolis police in late May 2020, and the resulting continuing Black Lives Matter massive national and international movement against the deaths of Floyd and others and the history of systemic American racism, including police shooting deaths, discrimination, and brutality against African Americans, particularly unarmed Black men. Such comprehensive street protests have not been seen in America since 1968. They represent, inter alia, the cover of disguises of national racism being publicly stripped away, and the national confrontation with irrefutable evidence of a wide spectrum of systemic rights violations and the deficits of American law and government to ensure African Americans’ basic rights. Further, Rescuing was published before it became fully apparent that the federal government's responses to Black Lives Matter, particularly the executive branch, would fan the racial conflicts of national mourning and demands for new justice narratives, rather than healing and unifying for American citizens as a whole, even as these protests were the most diverse in recent memory.

EVEN THE GODS DIE ... THE STATE FUNERAL AND NATIONAL MOURNING FOR THE ALBANIAN COMMUNIST DICTATOR ENVER HOXHA

This paper focuses on the death, state funeral, and national mourning for the Albanian communist dictator Enver Hoxha (1908–1985). This exploration of the emotional experiences and cultural strategies of coping with the death of a deathless leader aims to shed light on the performative roles of the ruling party, the workers, and the class enemies, as well as on the methods of ruling in a dictatorial system.

Familiar grammars of loss and belonging: curating trans kinship in post-dictatorship Argentina

On 24 March 1976, the Argentine military staged a coup d’état and established dictatorship. To eliminate radical left activists, the armed forces perpetrated mass civilian murder until democratic transition in 1983. The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo emerged, protesting their children’s disappearance by mobilizing portraiture to make visible familial rupture and indict the state. This article examines the archival exhibit, Esta se fue, a esta la mataron, esta murió (2017), which displayed trans women’s vernacular photographs and family albums from the 1970s–1980s, the same years as dictatorship. Analyzing the exhibit’s curatorial choices and the photographs’ material and haptic qualities, this article reads the exhibit alongside the Mothers’ iconic activist visual culture and national narratives of family loss. In doing so, the author suggests the exhibit renders trans sociality familial and familiar to a national viewing public, thereby reinterpreting Argentine history by installing trans subjects as proper subjects of national mourning.

Commemorating the deadly other side of externalized borders through \u201cmigrant-martyrs\u201d, sacrifices and politizations of (irregular) migration on the international migrants' day in Mali

This article explores the different memorial strategies of the civil society associations and the public authorities in Mali through various practices and discourses of the International Migrant Day around the stinging reality of migrants’ shipwrecks in the Mediterranean. Against the backdrop of the progressive externalization of European borders, the Libyan coast has become a hecatomb for young Malian migrant ‘adventurers’. In 2015, around 360 young people from the region of Kayes, in the Southwest of Mali, lost their lives. Under the pressure of civil society associations, the government of Mali decreed days of National Mourning in memory of the shipwrecked. Simultaneously the transnational network Afrique-Europe-Interact in collaboration with representatives of the city of Kita, organized a politically ritualized ceremony to carry out sacrifices honoring the deaths. Based on an ethnography of this mourning ceremony, the article shows how civil society actors denounce the appropriation of the tragic events by a state that “expels” its citizens incapable to develop and the European Union that “kills” by externalizing borders. A short media analysis of the government’s celebration serves as a contrast to the civil society engagement. Through these competing memorial strategies, the article presents the antagonistic but overlapping positionings between the public authorities with their northern partners condemning irregular migration, and the bereaved populations and the civil society considering migration as a normal strategy for a better life and cultural heritage. Our analysis reveals that the celebration of the International Migrants Day and the National Day of Mourning have led to the construction of alternative discourses on ‘irregular’ migration that call to account externalization and neoliberal policies and the risk-taking attitude of migrants in migratory tragedies embedded in very localized mourning practices.

Performing Utopia ed. by Rachel Bowditch and Pegge Vissicaro

Reviewed by: Performing Utopia ed. by Rachel Bowditch and Pegge Vissicaro Kareem Khubchandani PERFORMING UTOPIA. Edited by Rachel Bowditch and Pegge Vissicaro. Enactments series. Chicago: Seagull Books, 2018; pp. 288. In the edited volume Performing Utopia, readers are offered utopia and its corollaries, dystopia and heterotopia, as optics for understanding the relationship between politics and performance. The editors and contributors take their lead from Jill Dolan's Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater (2005) to explore the momentary and fragmentary glimpses of political possibility that performance permits. As the editors reiterate, utopia for Dolan is not a place, but a condition, sensation, or feeling conjured in the interstices of performance, audience, discourse, archive, and repertoire. Dolan argues that theatre audiences are participants in the performance and therefore essential to conjuring "hope at the theater." The parades, festivals, and public gatherings in Performing Utopia require a different approach to thinking utopia precisely because they are public and participatory, and therefore already presumed to be utopian. By offering in-depth histories, geographical contexts, and political-economic positioning, the authors probe the utopian discourses that surround festivals, rituals, and parades. In doing so, Performing Utopia engages a methodology very different from Dolan's and José Esteban Muñoz's, author of Cruising Utopia (2009). Rather than cruising for and happening upon communitas across heterogenous archives, the anthology's essays home in on venues where participation, joy, and ecstasy seem central to their ethos. The authors detail the histories and economies of their research sites, and they trace the genealogies of performance that make sociality contingent. These methods reveal the complex systems before and beyond the moment of performance that inform affects and aesthetics. While the first essay, by Luis Alvarez, explores the global travels of New Zealand–based Maori filmmaker Dean Hapeta, the editors have taken a primarily hemispheric approach to curating the volume, moving us across the Americas from western Canada through the continental United States to Brazil and Chile. Given this wide and varied geography, a strength of the collection is the detailed attention the authors give to situating the locations of their case studies. Katherine Nigh's study of the first Mardi Gras parade in New Orleans following the devastation wrecked by Hurricane Katrina details how divergent discourses and experiences of the parade emerge at the nexus of the negligence of the Bush administration and the racial histories and geographic textures of the city. Similarly, Bowditch maps an intimate history of the All Souls' Day procession in Tucson, which traces its exponential growth and changing style to explain how it offered a stage for national mourning after 9/11, while choreographing itself around urban structures and policies. In Néstor Bravo Goldsmith's chapter, we begin by gathering around a collapsed mine in Chile that has trapped thirty-three miners. He introduces us to the fascinating communities, performances, and rituals that popped up around the mining site, and to the hope and joy surrounding the miners' eventual rescue. But Goldsmith also pans across the country to concurrent events—in particular, a military parade and a hunger strike by incarcerated Indigenous activists—to demonstrate how the Chilean government capitalized on the rhetoric of hope surrounding the miners' rescue to obscure state-sanctioned violence. In addition to the geographic contexts that the authors offer, they also pay attention to the genealogies of their performances in valuable ways. In Christian DuComb's study of "wench" figures in the Philadelphia Mummers Parade, he details the anti-black origins of the forms of dress and gait enacted by white men performing the role. This performance historiography becomes a valuable way to interrupt a utopic approach to thinking about these particular white men reveling in drag. Laura Dougherty's detailed mapping of the contemporary burlesque world is paired with a genealogy of burlesque style that helps illustrate both the aesthetic techniques of older performers and the nuances of neo-burlesque performers riffing on the genre's past. Charting the recent history of Renaissance festivals in the United States and their hybrid and playful aesthetics, Kevin McHugh and Ann Fletchall name the incongruences between the contemporary "faire" and medieval feasts, festivals, and rituals. In examining...

Music, the media and the Thai state following the death of King Bhumibol: Popular music’s role in orchestrating certainty in Thailand’s existential crisis

Abstract Following the death of Thailand’s King Bhumibol Adulyadej on 13 October 2016, the country entered an official period of mourning. In an attenuation of existing practices rather than a departure from them, the unelected military government assumed control of all media and used it to curate the tone of national mourning. Music was then enlisted in the process to help shape the emotional register of the grieving process. Government-controlled media’s actions were exemplified in the broadcasting practices of the police-run radio station in the north-eastern city of Khon Kaen. It repeatedly played only a small number of structurally and aesthetically similar popular songs that shared hagiographic narrative themes of praise for the late king and emphasized national solidarity. The government’s use of its power, the importance of the king in the Thai imagination and the maintenance of societal equilibrium following his death are briefly explained through Bunn’s concept of ‘new censorship’.

The politics of mourning in post-communist Romania: unravelling the thanatopolitics of grievable deaths

ABSTRACT National days of mourning are state-sponsored rituals of collective grief enacted in the public sphere by political authorities to symbolically mark and emotionally cope with a socially significant loss. These officially declared and ceremonially performed state rituals of communion in grief provide privileged epistemic opportunities for unravelling the politics of grievability underpinning a society’s willingness to mourn its dead. This paper focuses on comparing and contrasting two case studies – the Colectiv nightclub fire and the flu epidemics – in order to grasp the politics of national mourning in the Romanian post-communist context. After identifying the criteria of grievability underlying the declaration of national mourning in cases of mass death as consisting in a ‘chronotopic togetherness’ in death that is characterised by an ‘instantaneity of emotional shock,’ the paper argues for enlarging these criteria of grievability so as to include the victims of socially invisible traumas inflicted by structural violence, such as those killed in epidemics and car road accidents.

Nations in black: charting the national thanatopolitics of mourning across European countries

ABSTRACTPeriods of national mourning have been on the rise in the last decades in European societies as part of a wider process of democratization, whereby ordinary citizens have been increasingly granted the honors of state condolences. However, despite their growing incidence, periods of national mourning have not received the due attention in social science scholarship. This study examines the patterns and politics of national mourning observed in European countries between 1989 and 2018, based on an exhaustive dataset compiled for this analytical purpose (N = 415). Periods of national mourning are understood here as instituting states of social exception during which state authorities enact ritual actions consisting in a sequence of choreographically staged performative acts meant to create a national community of grief in the face of what is framed as a socially meaningful loss. Against these considerations, the paper argues that there are two main political cultures of public mourning in Europe. Data analysis reveals that the continent is split diagonally between a sober, Northwestern and Protestant political culture of public mourning and a lavish, Southeastern one informed by the traditions of Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and Islam.

Revisiting Effects of Hunting on Mourning Dove Nest Survival

Abstract We reconstructed a historical dataset from a national mourning dove Zenaida macroura nesting study evaluating the effects of hunting on nesting birds during the September portion of the hunting season using Bayesian hierarchical models; the reconstructed dataset contained 707 nests. The original nest survival estimate of 96.3% (nonhunted zones) fell within the range of our average daily nest survival rates and credible intervals (CI) of 97.2% (95% CI: 96.2–98.0%) for nonhunted, but the original nest survival estimate of 95.5% (hunted zones) was lower than our average daily nest survival rates of 96.9% (95% CI: 96.1–97.7%) for hunted zones. Similarly, overall nest survival for areas and years combined for hunted zones was 44.3% (95% CI: 35.3%, 53.9%) and 48.1% (95% CI: 36.9%, 59.8%) for nonhunted zones. The most parsimonious model contained the primary covariates of hunted or nonhunted status (hunted or paired hunted) or paired hunted or nonhunted nest searching plot (zone), and year. We observed lower nest survival for the hunted or delayed-hunt zones compared to the zones with hunted or nonhunted season structure. Regional differences may be explained by states with early and late hunting seasons separated by ≥ 21 d compared to other pairs where hunted and nonhunted areas occurred simultaneously. Our reanalysis provides managers additional assurance that the basic premise of limited or no effect of harvest on mourning dove populations is still valid but continued monitoring of population status is warranted.

6 October - The memorial day of the Martyrs of Arad in historical perspective: commemoration practices, local and folklore traditions

The Hungarian revolution of 1848–1849 which broke out as a fight for civil reforms, new constitutional arrangements and national independence ended with the execution of the revolutionary generals on 6 October 1849 in Arad. Ever since, this day is marked annually all over the country as a day of national mourning, and in 2001 it was legally instituted in the calendar as a day of commemoration. The article explores the shaping of the cult of “the Martyrs of Arad” as well as the history and the format of commemorative events from the middle of the nineteenth century to the present day. Folklore (textual and ritual) traditions connected with the Martyrs of Arad, spread both in towns and the countryside and still define the meaning and content of the commemorative practices. A song about the Martyrs of Arad deserves special attention as it has remained a constant element of memorial events, which otherwise vary across the country