Heather Pool’s brilliant and wide-ranging new book, Political Mourning: Identity and Responsibility in the Wake of Tragedy, is a profound contribution to an emergent literature that focuses on how mourning becomes political. In particular, the book focuses on instances when the tragic deaths of ordinary citizens generate transformative political change. The book is timely, dynamic, and ultimately epiphanic.

Mourning is typically cast as an experience individuals undergo as they cope with personal loss. What is often neglected, however, is a sustained discussion of the politics of mourning. If John Dewey is right that politics is the process by which a public comes to understand itself as a public, then politics is distinctly the realm in which collectivities mobilize into various forms of empowered action. As such, political mourning appears to be an oxymoron, given that the political regards rich experiences of mutual active witnessing while mourning concerns the world-emptying grief of a private individual.

And yet, as Pool points out, this intuition is belied by some of the most resonant expressions of public mourning. The Gettysburg Address was a wartime funerary elegy that mourned the sacrifice of the dead, but also exhorted the living on their behalf by sublimating the experience of violent death into the rebirth of the republic. Similarly, the September 11 Memorial in Lower Manhattan bears testimony not only to the individuals who lost their lives at the World Trade Center in 2001 but also to the narratives of national remembrance, grieving, and commemoration that manifested in the aftermath of the attacks in ways clearly intended to marshal a politics of patriotism and group loyalty.

Key to Pool’s analysis are the twin themes of identity and responsibility. Questions of identity and responsibility have been interlinked at least since Thomas Hobbes’s seventeenth-century founding of the social contract tradition. Hobbes famously conceived citizens’ civic responsibilities as a quid pro quo: I forfeit my natural liberty over to the state, which in turn exercises a monopoly over violence and the right to punish, and in exchange I receive the security afforded by its law. This reciprocal obligation depends of course on the coherence of collective identity’s borderlands. A people can only enter into a social contract, and thus be bound, both to themselves as well as to their sovereign, insofar as they are indeed a people. And yet, as Pool points out, the borders of collective identity are protean. As those who are historically marginalized stake a claim to be included within the polity the borders of collective identity contract or expand. As a result, “as the borders of identity shift,” Pool argues, “the depth or breadth of our responsibilities to one another do too” (p. 30).

For Pool, “mournable moments” are “singularly powerful” catalysts for scrambling the coordinates of who belongs to the polis and on what basis. This is because the tragic loss of life, in particular when it manifests within a public sphere, presents an occasion for reflecting upon the a priori terms of grievability. If, for instance, George Floyd’s life matters to the polity, that is to say, if his death is affirmed as grievable, what should this acknowledgment portend for a broader set of urgent policy questions concerning criminal justice and race in the United States? Pool’s book attests to this politics of grievability and demonstrates how mourning involves not only retrospective reckoning (what ought to have been?) but also aspirations about what could be for the future in light of a theory of justice that is renewed after tragic loss.

One of Political Mourning’s great strengths lies in the way it illuminates the feedback loop between events and identities. Pool’s chapters include case studies that range from the Triangle Fire of 1911, to Emmett Till’s 1955 lynching, September 11, and the Black Lives Matter movement. While some of these events involve the deaths of many, others feature a single victim; and while two events took place in New York City others were located in Mississippi, Chicago, and beyond. What the case studies feature in common, however, is a set of shared themes: public grief, contested identities, shifting claims for responsibility, the conditions of possibility for meaningful response to loss, and, above all, the central importance of race to American political experience.

That collective mourning can galvanize a politics has become all too clear in the wake of the Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, Texas, even if this “mournable moment” has, to date, failed to yield much change for the future. Pool argues that “calls for political change need not be successful to fulfill criteria of a politics of mourning” (p. 41). But why should some ordinary deaths lead to political transformation when others do not? Pool explains that different types of political mourning fall on a spectrum that spans from more democratic to more sovereign. Where “democratic mourning” seeks to foreground relations of equality between citizens, “sovereign mourning” seeks to a foreground the interests of the state. “Democratic mourning” is more likely to lead to political change than “sovereign mourning,” Pool argues, because “democratic mourning” facilitates a politics of inclusion and equality, whereas “sovereign mourning” generates the opposite impulse. The example Pool offers is September 11, a paradigm of “sovereign mourning.” In the wake of the Patriot Act, civil liberties were curtailed while the powers of the state were magnified. Moreover, Muslims were targeted as scapegoats, a symptom of the grief-wrath that shadows the sovereign anxiety for security and certainty.

If the prospects for positive change turn on whether political mourning takes a democratic or sovereign shape in the aftermath of tragic loss, then Pool’s book could do more to identify why an event might give way to one or the other direction. “Much depends on who speaks for the dead and whether we listen to those affected or whether the meaning of the event is overtaken by other actors or speakers with agendas potentially unrelated to the event at hand” (p. 155). Indeed. But what accounts for whether and when this might happen? Should the vicissitudes of social media, so often cited as the source of pernicious polarization, account for whether political mourning trends democratic or sovereign? Or perhaps it is the deeper histories of racial exclusion that originate in our nation’s founding that explain the difference.

Pool concludes that, “It might be that there are some foundationally undemocratic institutions that cannot be changed unless we literally re-form the polity” (p. 158). This provocative assertion leaves the reader wondering what may be worth hoping for. In the end, Political Mourning remains a profoundly hopeful book that urges us to view hope not as an attachment to a necessary outcome of collective action, but rather as an attunement to the world of possibilities such actions open up. In Pool’s terms, “Mournable moments present a democratic polity with an opportunity to reevaluate and lessen the gap between ideals and reality—moments when we recognize and embrace a political, collective responsibility to do better by our fellow citizens” (p. 26). So long as we invoke the names of the unjustly dead on behalf of a world where everyone’s death should matter, political mourning can convoke a vibrant democratic act of resilience. Political Mourning is a deeply insightful, impassioned, and often dazzling testament to this act.