Sister Death

Sister Death : Political Theologies for Living and Dying (this is the final iteration of the title) borrows the figure of Sister Death from Francis of Assisi in order to stage a critique of political theologies, found in all western religions of the book"-Christianity, Judaism, Islam-and in other traditions as well, such as Zoroastrianism, that pit life and death against each other as ultimate enemies. This metaphor activates, within our mortal bodies, a permanent state of war. And it creates a social bifurcation between people who are said to be on the side of life and others who are on the side of death-the ultimate good and the ultimate evil. The book argues that this political theology of death resonates with and is complicit in what Achille Mbembecalls necropolitics, the racially motivated weaponization of death. We risk a grave misunderstanding of other people and ourselves ; we are unable to acknowledge the ecological functions of death, making enemies of dirt, fermentation, and aging ; and we cut off key dimensions of connection between the living and the dead. Sister Death argues that it is not only possible but necessary to disrupt this dominant story about life and death, which has been so influential in purportedly secular accounts of western history and politics (with analogues in a number of Asian countries); a new mythopoetic narrative is needed. Beatrice Marovich proposes alternative figurations-from sources including Francis of Assisi, Jacques Derrida, and Toni Morrison-of this life-death relation. Grassroots death awareness/positivity movements such as the Order of the Good Death, led by popular (1.6 million YouTube followers) mortician Caitlin Doughty, are reclaiming death rituals that restore the sacred space surrounding the corpse. Scholars in extinction studies, an important area within the environmental humanities, including the late Deborah Bird Rose, are concerned with how mass extinction events in the more than human world inform our own existential concerns. Afropessimist thinkers like Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, following James Baldwin, have demonstrated how white thinkers have projected death onto Black people and Blackness itself. Perhaps what Jacques Derrida called "lifedeath" is not a battle in which one force is ultimately overcome or colonized but is instead a contested, tense, and sometimes mutually empowering form of family relation-with Francis, a kind of sisterhood"--