This article is about elegy and transnationalism that similarly charts the rich tensions that arise between and within culturally diverse kinds. Elegy's affective content has transnational bearings: wherever there are bonds of family and friendship, death produces grief, mourning, and melancholia. It then distinguishes among varieties of, and develops a taxonomy for, elegiac transnationalism. But first, it dialectically investigates the nationalist and antinationalist strands of elegy. Death is seen not as national but as post-political and post-national. Elegy can be put in the service of...

This article is about elegy and transnationalism that similarly charts the rich tensions that arise between and within culturally diverse kinds. Elegy's affective content has transnational bearings: wherever there are bonds of family and friendship, death produces grief, mourning, and melancholia. It then distinguishes among varieties of, and develops a taxonomy for, elegiac transnationalism. But first, it dialectically investigates the nationalist and antinationalist strands of elegy. Death is seen not as national but as post-political and post-national. Elegy can be put in the service of nationalism, equivocal nationalism, anti-nationalism, transnationalism, and many combinations of these positions. Elegiac transnationalism can be tracked intrinsically and extrinsically. Its intrinsic factors are assessed. While nations erect hierarchies of grievability, transnational elegy's cross-cultural influences, solidarities, and migrations, its border-crossing influences, forms, and ontologies suggest other ways of mourning death than within physical barriers and conceptual lines patrolled by militaries and enforced by violence.