Agonistic mourning: Political dissidence and the Women in Black

In Agonistic Mourning, Athena Athanasiou embeds an ethnography of the Belgrade Women in Black (Ž ene u Crnom) in a dense framework of social and political theory, not only to understand the work undertaken by the collective, but also to think about how that work can help pose broader questions regarding sovereignty, memorialization, and the possibilities of dissidence. Founded in 1991, at the beginning of the wars of succession in the former Yugoslavia, Women in Black is an antimilitarist, antinationalist, feminist group, whose distinctive mode of protest, shared with other Women in Black groups, involves silent public vigils, the participants clad in black. For seven years, Athanasiou did field work with the group, spending extended time in Belgrade, participating in street actions, gatherings, and workshops; conducting extensive interviews with both long-term members who remember the wars, and younger ones who don’t; and learning from, and reflecting upon, their history and their ways of framing their praxis. This book draws from those observations and reflections to unsettle and broaden some central threads of contemporary political theory: questions of sovereign power, the modern biopolitical state, mourning and justice, and perhaps most importantly, the question of an agonistic politics.