The Politics of Mourning

Micki McElya's history of Arlington National Cemetery makes several important contributions to understanding the reverence instilled by the site in the contemporary United States. McElya asserts that Arlington National Cemetery offers “an opportunity to expand the contours of the honorable and brave, not diminish them” (pp. 10–11). Notwithstanding this goal, one of the book's main contributions is its documenting of the racism that factored into the site's development. McElya observes how burying U.S. dead stands for citizenship and patriotism, and then connects this observation to the site's fraught history with the interment of slaves, Native Americans, Japanese Americans, women, and African Americans. She illustrates Arlington National Cemetery's evolution from many points of view: from the slaves who lived on the site through contemporary African American visitors. The irony that the Arlington House was part of the Custis-Lee estate, which was once the home of Robert E. Lee, became a Union cemetery and eventually a national cemetery, is never far from the narrative

Art · Citizenship · Estate · Genealogy · Honor · Irony · Literature · Narrative · Navajo · Patriotism · Political science · Politics · Racism · Reverence · Sociology · Grief, Bereavement, and Mental Health · History · Law · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Philosophy

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