ABSTRACT

The murder of Trayvon Martin on February 26, 2012, and his killer’s exoneration in June of the following year set the stage for the contemporary liberation movement known as Black Lives Matter and the newly invigorated conversations about systemic racism currently underway. In this book, we ruminate on the nation’s inequitable state of affairs as we turn our attention to the genre most associated with mourning: the elegy. What kinds of elegiac responses are most appropriate to police killings, the surveillance of black communities, and the slow violence of socioeconomic disparities, among other structural forms of racism? This and other related questions that Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era centralizes. The book enriches the ongoing creative and scholarly exchanges regarding the poetics and politics of mourning. The critical chapters in Revisiting the Elegy enhance this scholarly discussion by attending to the cultural work performed by creative writers on behalf of victims of institutionalized racism.