PTN Discussion Group: Political Theologies of Loss

Political Theologies of Loss

The current moment is one of acute, intersecting, and compounding losses—millions lost to the COVID-19 pandemic, police assaults on Black life, ongoing climate emergency, and the intersection of these issues in public demonstrations seeking justice. This discussion group centers on both classic and new works on grief, grievance, and loss, paying particular attention to structures of race, sexuality, and nation. Over the course of six biweekly meetings, our discussions will take up topics including but not limited to: the psychic and political significance of mourning and melancholia; public performances of grief as strategies of democratization and political resistance; the collision of white and non-white forms of racial melancholia in contemporary social movements; the relationship between the temporality of grief and sacred time; melancholic responses to caring for the dead; and the subjects, communities, and imagined worlds created by rituals of mourning and memorialization.

Schedule

Meetings will be held every other Thursday starting February 11 from 5:30 to 7:00 p.m. ET. Please, contact Kris Trujillo to join the PTN discussion group (kjtrujillo@uchicago.edu) 

February 11

• Judith Butler, “Melancholy Gender—Refused Identifications”
• Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia”

February 25

• Juliet Hooker, “Black Protest / White Grievance: On the Problem of White Political Imaginations Not Shaped by Loss”
• Joseph R. Winters, Hope Draped in Black: Race, Melancholy, and the Agony of Progress (selections)
• “Joe Biden, Emissary of Grief”

March 11

• Dagmawi Woubshet, The Calendar of Loss: Race, Sexuality, and Mourning in the Early Era of AIDS (selections)
• Morgan M. Page and Sarah Schulman, “Queer Suicidality, Conflict, and Repair”

March 25

• Anne Boyer, The Undying

April 8

• Dana Luciano, Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America

April 22

• Toni Morrison, Beloved
• Rebecca Louise Carter, “Raising Dead Sons” in Prayers for the People: Homicide and Humanity in the Crescent City