Book Review: Disaffected: Emotion, Sedition, and Colonial Law in the Anglosphere

scandalous case of Black death respectable. It is the denial of such respectability politics by Black Lives Matter that makes it politically contentious today. BLM represents a space of disordered appearance that seems to block democratic mourning (at least among white publics), yet in discussing 9/11 Pool also shows how the failure to appear can lead to sovereign mourning. In depicting 9/11 as an attack on the Twin Towers, the buildings “eclipsed the bodies of the victims so completely that human deaths became practically invisible” (104). The bodies that did appear before the public were of “those with access to the media: primarily government and military officials” (112). While it is clear that appearance plays an important role in Pool’s model, more could be done to investigate the ways that deaths are made to appear or disappear, particularly when large-scale tragedies like climate change are at issue. Of course, such an investigation leads to a more pessimistic account of the possibilities for democratic mourning today. Pool ends her book by taking stock of the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. While COVID deaths are widespread, they are not yet public in ways that have motivated democratic debate and responsibility. Pool provides an excellent framework for thinking about the fact that these deaths occur both as a global tragedy and as a personal loss but do not yet seem to have any democratic political impact. Using Pool’s framework, we can think about the hiding away of bodies killed by COVID, the failure to hold employers legally responsible for COVID safety protocols, and the mass denial of the existence of COVID by certain white publics. Pool’s Political Mourning provides a model for analyzing our contemporary politics of mass death and for answering the important question of how we might transform a lack of care into a democratic act of mourning.