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This chapter examine Yosef Chaim Brenner’s Hebrew novel, Shekhol ve-khishalon (Breakdown and Bereavement). In the novel's fictional preface, the frame narrator, an emigrant on a boat from Port Said to Alexandria, absconds with a fellow emigrant’s Yiddish diaries and transforms them into a third-person Hebrew novel. The novel’s framing devices replicate the relations between Hebrew and Yiddish through a fractured narrative that calls into question the very possibility of narrative fiction. Whereas the novel’s frame explores the fraught multilingual conditions of literary production, the embedded narratives dramatize these conditions through the characters’ psychological crises. In Brenner’s novel, the various characters’ struggles with mental illness and suicide figure the larger linguistic and cultural crises of diasporic Jewish culture.

In modern society, food, life, and death have developed a rather precarious relationship with one another, as food consumption, class status, and notions of health are rapidly shifting, globalization is changing and increasing our food choices, and society is becoming more multi-cultural. Both death and food, in their rapidly changing states, must be examined and studied. Death in this book operates as a framing mechanism to allow food to play a central role in life and meaning giving, food as nourishing not only in substance, but also in significance.

Jung Eun Sophia Park’s chapter examines the function of food in Korean funeral rituals and memorial festivities in Buddhism, Korean Catholicism, and memorial activities. Park gives the reader a rich descriptive analysis of the various foods and their meanings in honoring the Korean dead, in the food ritual of Young San Jae, describing how food is utilized as a way to connect the living with the dead ancestors.

“Sweetening Death” presents a comparative analysis of the role of sugar and its transformation in funeral foods, remembrance rituals, documenting the ways the dead are perceived and understood as active or passive actors in their afterlives. Sugar, though widely available in the contemporary world, was initially utilized in memorialization and funereal practices because it connoted a particular status to the dead, though it is now ironically a staple of the lower classes and a symbol of malnutrition. The comparison in food bereavement and memorialization rituals highlights a distinct difference between the function of food on the American table in comparison to the Mexican or Chinese context, revealing that while food functions to largely aide the bereaved and reintegrate the grieving into their social network without the deceased in the American context, it literally functions to feed the dead in Mexico and China.

Joshua Graham writes on the role of funeral foods in the American South, examining how these foods function in helping Southerners come to terms with their grief, in light of theabsent deceased. He examines the role of several foods and drinks (particularly the absence of alcohol) common in Southern Baptist culture in funeral repasts, and questions the lack of current American scholarship on “continuing bonds theory” in American grieving customs. Graham makes a compelling argument for its application in his chapter, while offering the reader a richly textured ethnography of contemporary American funeral feasts.

Lacy Crocker and Gordon Fuller’s chapter considers bagels as a symbol of the eternal return of life in the midst of death. Crocker and Fuller’s chapter focuses on the symbol of the eternal cycle of return, with the bagel’s roundness illustrating the wholeness of death as a completion of life. Crocker and Fuller’s chapter reveals that the Jewish conception of death emphasizes the importance of life, and seeks not to dwell in the shadows of death.

David Oualaalou discusses the role of couscous in emphasizing Moroccan identity and mourning the dead. Couscous, through its ordinariness, and because it is an everyday staple, underscores the role of death as a part of life—as something not only unavoidable, but necessary in order to truly live as a Muslim. He also traces the shifting influences of class and status on these traditional mourning staples, noting that because of globalization and capitalism, Muslim funerals in contemporary Morocco are becoming less concerned with communal bereavement and are instead stressing the individual’s life through expensive shows of wealth and class through more complicated and expensive foods.

Christa Shusko’s chapter focuses on how alcohol-drinking rituals mimic the drinking of blood (really a “blood” punch) in male fraternity groups. Shusko’s chapter examines how the living face death and form community through food, albeit through male bonding rituals of consuming alcohol and reenacting illicit and horrific acts. Shusko contends that alcohol acts as both conduit and medium through which the living come to terms with both death and the macabre. Unlike Graham, who argues that the absence of alcohol reinforces Protestant, and particularly Baptist identity, Shusko points to the use of alcohol as a cohesive agent that brings the community together.

Radikobo Ntsimane’s chapter is an examination of the intersection of food and death among the Tswana and Zulu peoples in South Africa, discussing the function of funerals in feeding the living, and the ways in which funerals can help socially and economically sustain a community. His analysis of the shift in the economic sustainability of funeral feasting in times of scarcity and widespread diseases such as AIDS in Africa is both valuable and important, providing a social and cultural critique that forces the reader to think about the function of funerals, and their effects on the community. In this chapter, the reader understands that the funeral attendants are dying to eat, both literally and figuratively.

The denial of death in contemporary American society can be found in bereavement policies, the reclassification of grief as a major depressive disorder, and the emerging popularity of grassroots memorialization. This chapter briefly traces the changing understanding of grief and examines newly emerging bereavement practices in light of these changes.

This chapter explores the debate about eliminating the bereavement exclusion in the DSM-5. The public side of the debate (should grief be classified as a mental disorder?) was largely about the proper place of scientific and psychiatric authority in society. The academic side of the debate (should depressive symptoms that occur between two and eight weeks after the death of a loved one be considered a psychiatric disorder?) was about what is to be counted as a real disorder. The philosophical work of the chapter contrasts the de facto essentialism adopted in much of psychiatry with the more empiricist imperfect community model. From the de facto essentialist perspective, the debate was about how to distinguish a simulacrum of depression that occurs after bereavement from a true depression. From the perspective of the imperfect community model, the debate was about whether some depressions should be normalized.

German female artists depicted many examples and different variations of the female mourner that were generated by the traumatic confrontation with mass death and mass bereavement in war. Women's visual responses served as a tool to highlight the disconsolate nature of women's bereavement and to re-imagine burial rites that had been obstructed by the conflict. These images capture the dynamics of the ‘communities’ in mourning that emerged locally all over Europe during the war, but, importantly, the figure of the female mourner occupies a particular presence. In this gendered view of bereavement, exposing women's emotional pain visually served to express emotions that were incongruous in wartime society and to challenge the viewer with a different perspective on wartime loss.

This essay analyses Fallen Son: The Death of Captain America (2007), a five-issue limited series from Marvel Comics. The series is designed as an exploration of grief and bereavement, looking in on the moments unfolding in the wake of Captain America’s death and tracing out the reactions of Marvel’s most central characters to the loss of their friend and comrade as they work through the stages model of grief famously articulated by Kübler-Ross. But rather than analyze Fallen Son as a demonstration of that model, this essay suggests that it is more useful to read the series for the ways that it undermines Kübler-Ross’ framework, navigating the complex affective territory of grief in loss by challenging the very diagrammatic structure of staged emotional categories it purports to employ as narrative chapters.

The defeat in the Balkan Wars marked a time of deep soul-searching for the Ottoman elite. The vast Ottoman literature on the defeat displayed feelings of tremendous bereavement and loss. It also presented a search for directions and paths for renewal. The conclusion discusses the defeat as a major trigger for change promoted by Ottoman authors and publicists. For many of them the defeat served as an awakening alarm that should promote the process of remaking the Ottoman state and the Ottomans, thus clearly defying some of the most important civic perceptions of the Constitutional Revolution of 1908. Chief among them was disillusionment with the idea of an inclusive Ottoman identity based on equal citizenship. The defeat put an end to this concept and created new boundaries that separated the Muslims or Turks of the Ottoman state from the non-Muslim minorities. The evolution of Turkish national identity, very much connected to Islam and Ottomanism, but possessing distinct features within the Ottoman-Muslim community, was reflected in the Ottoman literature on the Balkan Wars and in some popular campaigns and administrative reforms. Furthermore, the defeat also legitimized and popularized bigoted discourses calling for exclusion of the non-Muslims and their marginalization.

Pursuing a relational approach, Part II tells the story of Amat al-Latif’s childhood and early adult life in an elite household viewed through the prism of her intimate relationship with her father. Amat al-Latif’s narrative explains how the momentous events of 1948 – her father’s arrest, the collapse of the constitutional government, the sack of her city, house demolition ‒ have impacted upon her life’s trajectories, above all the loss of close relatives to disease and execution, early marriage and dispossession after the failed revolt. It dwells on the precariousness of everyday life in the aftermath of her family’s downfall and women’s exposure to destitution, and the ways in which she has dealt with violent bereavement. Amat al-Latif also had to deal with her husband’s father’s overbearing wife in her patrilocal household, refusing to subordinate herself to her. However, instead of employing the trope of resistance, it is argued that women’s noncompliance is frequently articulated within existing socio-cultural norms rather than the expression of an oppositional subjectivity.