Political Mourning: Identity and Responsibility in the Wake of Tragedy. By Heather Pool. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2021. 260p. $110.50 cloth, $34.95 paper

Alexander Keller Hirsch
2022 Perspectives on Politics  
and Argentina, to name a few, engage in protest movements, they borrow resistance practices from one another, adapt those practices to their own political realities, and innovatively use the language of civil disobedience, thereby offering insights into the limits and untapped potentials of civil disobedience. The absence of such a global perspective is especially conspicuous in a volume that opens with a compelling conceptual history of civil disobedience documenting how the concept traveled
more » ... om one country to another, taking a different form each step of the way. According to Hanson's riveting account, civil disobedience was first introduced in the United States in sermons against the Fugitive Slave Law and appropriated by the editors who posthumously used it to title Thoreau's essay "Civil Disobedience"; the term was then taken up in the United Kingdom as Thoreau's work was reissued by those with Tolstoy-inspired Christian Pacifist leanings. Finding its way to South Africa through those UK-based publications, it was appropriated by Gandhi whose unique conceptualization of civil disobedience was then reinterpreted by King. Can we find the traces of a similar iterative interpretive process today, whereby civil disobedience is being reinvented by activists in different parts of the world? While The Cambridge Companion to Civil Disobedience does not address this question, it offers a brilliant and illuminating overview of the contemporary debates on civil disobedience and for that it will no doubt become an invaluable resource for anyone who is interested in politics of protest.
doi:10.1017/s1537592722002535 fatcat:62hmsxmgirhejl32ccwhqeghfa