ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book looks at the cross-cultural transmission of attitudes towards death and mourning between Native American culture and that of whites. It examines how death and mourning were entwined with political agency in nineteenth-century society. The book explores how African-American writers of the 1850s sought to alleviate the damaging emotional and political effects of slavery. It argues that African-American authors articulated their sense of grievance through a strategy of metonymic displacement, extending mourning for specific deaths to a generalized sense of mourning occasioned by slavery. The book discusses the centrality of imagined participation in another's mourning, or 'representative bereavement', to the modern nation form, in the context of African-American experience at the end of the Civil War. It focuses on the ways in which African Americans participated in the national work of mourning Lincoln.
