Decolonial Mourning and the Caring Commons

Migration-Coloniality Necropolitics and Conviviality Infrastructure

Encarnacion Gutierrez Rodriguez author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Anthem Press

Published:15th Aug '23

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Decolonial Mourning and the Caring Commons cover

Explores how mourning is shaped both by its historical context and the political labor of caring commons, building a conviviality infrastructure of support against migration-coloniality necropolitics.

This book engages with decolonial mourning by bearing witness to the political grief work of contemporary struggles against migration-coloniality necropolitics in Europe, the United States and Latin America.

This book is the product of an endless individual and collective process of mourning. It departs from the author’s mourning for her parents, their histories and struggles in Germany as Gastarbeiter, while it also engages with the political mourning of intersectional feminist movements against feminicide inCentral and South America; the struggles against state and police misogynoir violence of #SayHerName in the United States; the resistance of refugees and migrantized people against the coloniality of migration in Germany; and the intense political grief work of families, relatives, and friends who lost their loved ones in racist attacks from the 1980s until today in Germany. Bearing witness to their stories and accounts, this book explores how mourning is shaped both by its historical context and the political labor of caring commons, while it also follows the building of a conviviality infrastructure of support against migration-coloniality necropolitics, dwelling toward transformative and reparative practices of common justice.

This is a thoroughly researched account that delves into the affective and political implications of memory and mourning in the context of collective struggles against border necropolitics, feminicide and the coloniality of migration. In its vivid detail and energetic commitment, the book traces situated acts of remembering and resisting modern colonial intersectional violence, thereby calling for a feminist intersectional framework that engages grief as a method to mobilize entangled temporalities of antiracist solidarity, collective care and social justice. — Athena Athanasiou, Professor, Department of Social Anthropology, Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences


This is an original and groundbreaking theoretical elaboration of the political communal labor of mourning and the possibilities of creating a caring common. Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez de-velops a highly sophisticated discussion about decolonial mourning as affective labor in the context of migration, border controls, and racial capitalism. The book also documents collective forms of organizing and mourning in the wake of racist violence, extinction, and feminicide. The book is essential reading for all those interested in understanding the politics of death and violence, but also in thinking about how to collectively work towards a caring common. — SuviKeskinen, Professor of Ethnic Relations, University of Helsinki, Finland

ISBN: 9781839988776

Dimensions: 229mm x 153mm x 26mm

Weight: 454g

264 pages