Urban Lament: Collective Expressions of Pain, Rage, and Affection

by Kyklàda

Lamentation practices can empower the potentiality to defy patriarchal orders ruling everyday life. Always a collective process, lamentation inscribes loss and vulnerability by tending bridges towards the world of the dead and the more-than-human. Gestures such as singing or breathing, gathering, and performances that exceed rationality can inspire a renewed approach to life and death, rural and urban. After all, amidst ongoing processes of extinction, how to mourn a queer activist, a Roma father, a burnt forest, an exiled body, and a ship sunken in the Mediterranean? How to experience loss not as something individual, but within an expanded continuum of pain? How to explore emotions beyond the private sphere? Through case studies and narrations, in different times and geographies surrounding the Aegean Sea, this book amplifies the echoes of collective tears to invigorate contemporary mourning practices that claim public space by grief, rage, and affect.

96 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2023

Reviews

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

Urban Lament is the second book from publishing house Kyklada I picked up recently, this time focusing on essays about mourning and ritual public lamentations. I enjoy studying mourning and rituals, so this was very engaging for me, but it didn’t quite land the same way Public Health in Crisis did. It includes poems and personal stories about the power of public grief, with special focus on how this grief can be used as a form of protest. I would recommend it, especially for those interested in modern-day Mediterranean/ Greek social history.