This is a brilliant and readable book that has the great strength of bringing social and political theory together with engaging ethnography.
Judith Butler, University of California, Berkeley This is a passionate, engaged and philosophically complex book. It is a powerful meditation on the politics of mourning. In one place, Athanasiou recalls interviewing Slavica Stojanovic, a member of ZuC, who tells her: 'Ours is a cruel mourning. It is a mourning without sentimentality.' This radical vision of agonistic mourning which involves public dissidence and the creation of haunting symbols and compelling counter-memories is what animates Women in Black throughout the globe. In our century, it is one way to forge more socially just worlds.
Joanna Bourke, Birkbeck, University of London, Times Higher Education Agonistic Mourning reinvigorates but also reaches beyond the anthropology of activism and social movements: it is also a study of the intersections of gender and desire with the political, of ethics as relational and unsettling, and of the relationship between language, affect and performativity. Equally, for those troubled by the inadequacy of liberal and humanitarian responses to loss and abjection, the book is an ethnographically grounded call to rethink the ethics and politics of mourning, as well as what it means to mobilise around the notion of solidarity with others.
Fiona Wright, University of Cambridge, Social Anthropology