Abstract
In 2015, Danish-Palestinian Omar El-Hussein shot and killed two men in Copenhagen, before being killed himself by the police. Danish media immediately classified El-Hussein’s actions as ‘a terrorist attack’, and they became the object of extreme concern to the Danish public. In the following days, the two murder sites were momentarily turned into public memorial spaces. When the site of the killing of El-Hussein also became a site of mourning, however, it prompted a negative reaction from politicians and the white majority public. While the mixed reactions to publicly mourning a murderer are understandable, they also reveal something about the racialized conditions of public mourning. Reading the different acts of publicly mourning El-Hussein, the article investigates the ways in which public sites of grief are outlined by racialized economies. This article builds upon Butler’s argument that public mourning forms as indicative of which lives are considered lives at all. However, we argue that such an analysis must consider the racialized logics of the performativity of public mourning: Thus, while non-white grief seems not to be recognized as grief at all, white grief tends to reiterate the racialized processes that outline white lives as grievable at the expense of non-white lives.
| Translated title of the contribution | Sorgens hvide telt: Racialiserede betngelser for offentlig sorg i Danmark |
|---|---|
| Original language | English |
| Journal | Social & Cultural Geography |
| Pages (from-to) | 1-19 |
| Number of pages | 19 |
| ISSN | 1470-1197 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2021 |