Taking stock of a century of pervasive loss - of warfare, disease, and political strife - this book considers 'what is lost' in terms of 'what remains'. It reveals how melancholia can lend meaning and force to notions of activism, ethics, and identity.

Illustrations Preface Introduction: Mourning Remains David L. Eng and David Kazanjian I. Bodily Remains Returning the Body without Haunting: Mourning "Nai Phi" and the End of Revolution in Thailand Rosalind C. Morris Black Mo'nin' Fred Moten Ambiguities of Mourning: Law, Custom, and Testimony of Women before South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission Mark Sanders Catastrophic Mourning Marc Nichanian Between Genocide and Catastrophe David Kazanjian and Marc Nichanian Passing Shadows: Melancholic Nationality and Black Critical Publicity in Pauline E. Hopkins's Of One Blood Dana Luciano Melancholia and Moralism Douglas Crimp II. Spatial Remains The Memory of Hunger David Lloyd Remains to Be Seen: Reading the Works of Dean Sameshima and Khanh Vo Susette Min Mourning Becomes Kitsch: The Aesthetics of Loss in Severo Sarduy's Cobra Vilashini Cooppan Theorizing the Loss of Land: Griqua Land Claims in Southern Africa, 1874--1998 David Johnson Left Melancholy Charity Scribner III. Ideal Remains All Things Shining Kaja Silverman A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia David L. Eng and Shinhee Han Passing Away: The Unspeakable (Losses) of Postapartheid South Africa Yvette Christianse Ways of Not Seeing: (En)gendered Optics in Benjamin, Baudelaire, and Freud Alys Eve Weinbaum Legacies of Trauma, Legacies of Activism: ACT UP's Lesbians Ann Cvetkovich Resisting Left Melancholia Wendy Brown Afterword: After Loss, What Then? Judith Butler Contributors Index

"If catastrophe is not representable according to the narrative explanations which would ‘make sense’ of history, then making sense of ourselves and charting the future are not impossible. But we are, as it were, marked for life, and that mark is insuperable, irrecoverable. It becomes the condition by which life is risked, by which the question of whether one can move, and with whom, and in what way is framed and incited by the irreversibility of loss itself."—Judith Butler, from the Afterword

"Loss is a wonderful volume: powerful and important, deeply moving and intellectually challenging at the same time, ethical and not moralistic. It is one of those rare collections that work as a multifaceted whole to map new areas for inquiry and pose new questions. I found myself educated and provoked by the experience of participating in an ongoing dialogue."—Amy Kaplan, author of The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture