Abstract
Chapter 5 shows how memory and grief over wrongs engender positive agency. The chapter notes the limitations of the stages-of-grief model in which the “back-to-normal” state is privileged, rather than allowing remembered loss to positively reorder self-identity. Privileging holding on to loss, the chapter interprets ecclesia as that which is “gathered together” by the grief of victims and survivors. By placing persons who fall/fell outside one’s frames of recognition inside one’s frames of recognition, grief moves persons and positively reorders dominant self-identity. While reordering and transformation of self-identity is the internal work of grief, the reordering and transformation of discriminatory in-group/out-group differences is part of grief’s external work—that which the book calls “rites.”
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Notes
- 1.
Several influences inform my work here. I get the term “cultural orbit” from Shklar; see Ordinary Vices, 43. The idea that “sameness” can be recognized in others as oneself comes from Ricoeur’s work Oneself as Another. I adapt the language of “frames” from Butler’s work, Frames of War. Gutierrez enables an understanding of “sin” as breach of friendship; see Theology of Liberation, 24.
- 2.
Tyson, Blood of Emmett Till, 173–174.
- 3.
I depend on Tyson’s Blood of Emmett Till for all details.
- 4.
Tyson, Blood of Emmett Till, 64.
- 5.
I am thinking particularly of Jesurathnam’s observation that the oppressed honor divine agency by noting God’s charge, “Vengeance is mine” (Deut. 32:35). Jesurathnam also mentions Psalm 94 in this connection. See Jesurathnam, “Towards a Dalit Liberative Hermeneutics,” 19.
- 6.
In light of previous chapters’ discussion of wrongs as rituals of humiliation enacted against historically marginalized people who move “out of place,” it is important to understand the larger context that fueled racialized hate in 1955 that took Till’s life. As Tyson rightly observes, “In many ways Emmett Till was a casualty of the anger produced by the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, handed down on May 17, 1954.” See Tyson, Blood of Emmett Till, 76–106 for more background on this point. The 1954 Supreme Court decision was perceived as encouraging African–Americans to move “out of place.”
- 7.
Bama, Karukku, 94.
- 8.
Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 198.
- 9.
Cone, Cross and the Lynching Tree, 134, 139. Taylor also gives this special attention in Executed God, 451–471.
- 10.
On this particular point, see Copeland, “Wading through Many Sorrows,” 109–129.
- 11.
Jon Sobrino, cited in Cone, Cross and the Lynching Tree, 161.
- 12.
Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom, 49.
- 13.
Tyson, Blood of Emmett Till, 208–209.
- 14.
Mitscherlich and Mitscherlich, Inability to Mourn, xviii.
- 15.
Fisher, Vehement Passions, 214.
- 16.
Fisher notes how grief is a profound “emotional” experience. See Fisher, Vehement Passions, 202.
- 17.
Butler uses “frames of recognizability” from which I adapt the phrase. See Butler, Frames of War, 36.
- 18.
Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 29–30.
- 19.
See Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself.
- 20.
Scott, “Journeys in Grief,” 79.
- 21.
Goss, Dead but Not Lost, 4.
- 22.
Tyson, Blood of Emmett Till, 68.
- 23.
Tyson, Blood of Emmett Till, 1, 7.
- 24.
Vaughn, “Recovering Grief in the Age of Grief Recovery,” 37–38.
- 25.
I depend on Scott, “Journeys in Grief,” 80–81, for these distinctions.
- 26.
Oxford English Dictionary.
- 27.
Stroebe et al., “Introduction,” 6.
- 28.
Stroebe et al., “Introduction,” 6.
- 29.
See note 1 by James Strachey in Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 243.
- 30.
Butler, Psychic Life of Power, 167.
- 31.
Butler, Psychic Life of Power, 171–172.
- 32.
Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 244.
- 33.
Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 253.
- 34.
Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 244.
- 35.
Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 246.
- 36.
Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 246.
- 37.
See Luciano, “Passing Shadows,” 156–157. Luciano (157) notes importantly that “melancholia’s purported truth-telling critical capacity may also allow it to shadow the dominant ideology of a given historical era.”
- 38.
Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 248.
- 39.
Butler, Psychic Life of Power, 180.
- 40.
Butler, Psychic Life of Power, 185.
- 41.
McIvor, “Mourning in America,” 138.
- 42.
Tyson, Blood of Emmett Till, 65.
- 43.
Winters, “Remembering the Dismembered,” 4.
- 44.
Frankowski, “Cassandra Complex,” 17.
- 45.
Frankowski, “Cassandra Complex,” 17.
- 46.
Hyacinth, “Perceptions of Loss and Grief Experiences within Religious Burial and Funeral Rites and Rituals.” Although Hyacinth is dependent on a stages-of-grief model, she (116) argues helpfully that “grief is not culture free.” This insight is also found in Boulware’s work on African–American grief experience. See Boulware, “African American Grief Experience,” 99–100. Laidler is another recent commentator who is influenced by the “stages” model but recognizes that psychologists have nevertheless noted that grief can be “a never-ending process, which could last a lifetime.” See Laidler, “Mother’s Grief,” 15–16. For a description of how grief can be a continuous process, see Neimeyer, Baldwin, and Gillies, “Continuing Bonds and Reconstructing Meaning,” 715–738. See also Steeves, “Rhythms of Bereavement,” 1–10.
- 47.
McIvor, “Mourning in America,” 77–78.
- 48.
McIvor, “Mourning in America,” 77–78.
- 49.
McIvor, “Mourning in America,” 125.
- 50.
McIvor, “Mourning in America,” 127–129, 145–146.
- 51.
McIvor, “Mourning in America,” 156.
- 52.
Tyson, Blood of Emmett Till, 211.
- 53.
Kelley, Grief, 15. Kelley’s account (35–39) agrees with contemporary critiques of conventional understandings of mourning such as “a norm for mourning,” “a prescribed tone for mourning,” and “a return to normal.”
- 54.
Nagy, “Religious Weeping As Ritual in the Medieval West,” 122.
- 55.
Butler, Psychic Life of Power, 191.
- 56.
Butler, Psychic Life of Power, 148.
- 57.
Cited in Tyson, Blood of Emmett Till, 66.
- 58.
Tyson, Blood of Emmett Till, 66.
- 59.
Tyson, Blood of Emmett Till, 69.
- 60.
Shklar, Ordinary Vices, 43.
- 61.
Shklar, Ordinary Vices, 43.
- 62.
Butler, Undoing Gender, 17–18.
- 63.
Tyson, Blood of Emmett Till, 39, 41.
- 64.
Tyson, Blood of Emmett Till, 56.
- 65.
Butler, Frames of War, 36.
- 66.
Butler, Psychic Life of Power, 24.
- 67.
Butler, Psychic Life of Power, 18.
- 68.
Khanna, Algeria Cuts, 7.
- 69.
Butler, “Afterword,” 467.
- 70.
Tracy, Blessed Rage for Order, 204.
- 71.
Winters, “Audacity to Mourn,” 51.
- 72.
Winters, “Audacity to Mourn,” 52.
- 73.
Winters, “Audacity to Mourn,” 52.
- 74.
Vaughn, “Recovering Grief in the Age of Grief Recovery,” 42.
- 75.
Vaughn, “Recovering Grief in the Age of Grief Recovery,” 42.
- 76.
Butler, Frames of War, 15.
- 77.
Sometimes it is the external work (various rites) that makes possible internal work. The process is not always linear. I emphasize external work because of a dominant disregard of its importance.
- 78.
Winters, “Audacity to Mourn,” 53. Winters is referring to political theorist Sheldon Wolin’s work here.
- 79.
Winters, “Audacity to Mourn,” 53.
- 80.
Lévinas, Otherwise than Being, 68.
- 81.
Lévinas, Difficult Freedom, 293.
- 82.
Lévinas, Otherwise than Being, 48.
- 83.
Wilson, Twice Alienated, i.
- 84.
NRSV.
- 85.
Brueggemann, Prophetic Imagination, 11.
- 86.
Bama, Karukku, 90.
- 87.
O’Donovan, Desire of the Nations, 15.
- 88.
O’Donovan, Desire of the Nations, 15.
- 89.
O’Donovan, Desire of the Nations, 15.
- 90.
O’Donovan, Desire of the Nations, 16.
- 91.
For an introduction to commentary on this subject, see Brueggemann, Interpretation and Obedience; Gadamer, Truth and Method; Ricoeur, Essays on Biblical Interpretation; Ricoeur, Conflict of Interpretations; Thiselton, Hermeneutics; and Tracy and Grant, Short History of the Interpretation of the Bible; Tracy, Plurality and Ambiguity.
- 92.
Bama, Karukku, 90.
- 93.
Lévinas, “Difficult Freedom,” 84.
- 94.
I am working from Taylor’s unpublished (in English) manuscript of the lecture delivered at Faculdade Unida de Vitória, Vitória, Brazil, on June 9 and 13, 2013. The lecture has been translated and published in Portuguese as “Public Theology and Liberating Ecclesia Today.” See Taylor, “Teologia Pública E Ekklesia Libertadora Hoje,” 179–204. Thanks are due to Taylor for giving me access to the English version.
- 95.
Tyson, Blood of Emmett Till, 74.
- 96.
Tyson, Blood of Emmett Till, 213.
- 97.
For a work that notes connections between lamentation, grief, and the constitution of Christian communities through ritual lamentation and remembrance, see Corley, Maranatha.
- 98.
Taylor, Executed God, 337–338.
- 99.
Taylor, Executed God, 339.
- 100.
Taylor, Executed God, 332, 346. Taylor is not keen on accenting the “divine” in his account. His (18) emphasis, is rather, on “how life may be resurgent in the wake of the killing of Jesus.” See the section “Christology as Politics of Remembrance,” 16–31 in Executed God.
- 101.
Metz, Faith in History and Society, 89.
- 102.
Pineda-Madrid, Suffering and Salvation in Ciudad Juárez, 141–152.
- 103.
Ada MaríaIsasi-Díaz, cited in Pineda-Madrid, Suffering and Salvation in Ciudad Juárez, 139.
- 104.
Pineda-Madrid, Suffering and Salvation in Ciudad Juárez, 141.
- 105.
Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom, 100.
- 106.
Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom, 100.
- 107.
Guru, Humiliation, xi.
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Boopalan, S.J. (2017). Agential Roles of Memory and Grief: Internal and External Works (or Rites) . In: Memory, Grief, and Agency. New Approaches to Religion and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58958-9_5
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