Overview

This book examines late nineteenth-century feminism in relation to technologies of the time, marking the crucial role of technology in social and literary struggles for equality. Through an ethnographic account of the urban feminist and antinationalist movement Women in Black of Belgrade during the Yugoslav wars, Athanasiou shows that we might understand their dissident politics of mourning as a means to refigure political life beyond sovereign accounts of subjectivity and agency.

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9781474420150

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Reviews

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 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"" This is a powerful book in many ways: Athanasiou has accomplished something that is not to be underestimated in bringing a substantial archive of political, social and anthropological theory to bear on her ethnography of Women in Black.--Sara Murphy, New York University ""Contemporary Political Theory"" This is an important book in many ways: Athanasiou has accomplished something that is hard to achieve within the field of social anthropology. She has skillfully balanced social theory, philosophy and anthropological literature with the narratives of her participants ... [It] is a stimulating book that puts forward insightful analyses of how agonistic mourning can help us reconceptualise, reconfigure and reimagine feminist political action and critical agency ... The close exploration of the 'not-yet' at the heart of the political - its promise and its limitations, its longings and its constitutive limits - through a deep engagement with the role of mourning and vulnerability in the discursive reconfiguration of the political, is the great merit of this book.--Diana Manesi, Goldsmiths, University of London ""Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture"" This is without question an exceptional book written by Athena Athanasiou, an outstanding feminist scholar, anthropologist and creative thinker... and serves as a groundbreaking insight into the uneasy topic of human mourning.--Biljana Kasic ""Public Anthropologist"" The somewhat dense prose that results is brought to life by Athanasiou's sensitivity to ethnographic detail, through which an activist's preference for black clothing or her passion for reading Virginia Woolf, for example, become pivots around which a complex theory of radical politics speaks to the lived experience of activist subjectivity. Agonistic Mourning might be considered a robust defence of theory as a way to speak not only about but also with our interlocutors.--Fiona Wright, University of Cambridge ""Social Anthropology"" This book is a theoretically exciting, rare example of Arendtian storytelling, a theory of the political at its best. While telling a story about intersecting processes of agon and mourning, it raises the political investment of the uncompromising feminist movement Women in Black to a new level of presentation.--Dasa Duhaček, University of Belgrade"

Author Information

Athena Athanasiou is Associate Professor of Social Anthropology at Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Athens, Greece.

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