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Lookup NU author(s): Professor Anne Whitehead
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This chapter focuses on three elegies that respond to deaths by shooting: Laura Apol’s A Fine Yellow Dust (2021), written in the year following her daughter’s suicide; Fred D’Aguiar’s ‘Elegies’ (2009), written in response to the Virginia Tech shootings in 2007; and Danez Smith’s Don’t Call Me Dead (2017), a collection that contains lyrical elegies for Black youth in America who have died by shooting, including by the police. The prevailing emphasis of debates around gun violence has been on prevention and the psychology of the individual shooter. The elegies that I examine reorient attention to the gendered, racial and colonial power structures that subtend deaths by shooting in America. The chapter’s constellation of voices throws into relief the exceptionalism of death by shooting in white America and its normative status as a quotidian reality in black America. Read together, the elegies focus attention away from individual mental health to highlight questions of social justice and the need for social and cultural change; and they also register the long implication of the elegy as a form that is implicated in demarcating those lives that are worthy of public commemoration from those that are not. The chapter positions disenfranchised grief as a nuanced framework for describing the variety of modes through which grief can be culturally stigmatised. While identifying disenfranchised grief as a helpful hermeneutic model, the chapter proposes that attention to the category of suffocated grief is also necessary, in order to articulate a scalar model that can register the difference between social stigma and a total climate of oppression.
Author(s): Whitehead A
Editor(s): anna six
Publication type: Book Chapter
Publication status: Published
Book Title: Madness in Literature and Visual Culture : Critical Interventions
Year: 2026
Pages: 117-132
Print publication date: 17/09/2026
Online publication date: 30/07/2026
Acceptance date: 14/01/2026
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Place Published: London
URL: https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/encyclopedia-chapter?docid=b-9781350386921&tocid=b-9781350386921-chapter6
Library holdings: Search Newcastle University Library for this item
ISBN: 9781350386891
