Sister Death

Winner, 2024 Bela Kornitzer Alumni Award, Drew UniversityLife and death are commonly seen as representing the starkest of binaries: Death is the ultimate adversary of all that lives. Beatrice Marovich argues that such understandings of mortality have been deeply influenced by a strain of Christian political theology that has left its mark on both religious and secular narratives. Adapting the figure of "e;Sister Death"e; from Saint Francis of Assisi, she calls for recognizing that life and death are family.Drawing on a wide range of sources-from Toni Morrison to Jacques Derrida, psychoanalysis to grassroots "e;death positive"e; movements-Marovich critiques a racialized political theology that pits life and death against each other in a state of endless war. In a time of extinctions, it is necessary to disrupt this dominant story in order to apprehend death as a collective, multispecies event. Sister Death proposes an alternative view in which life and death are not mortal enemies destined for mutual destruction. Instead, they are engaged in a contested, tense, and sometimes mutually empowering form of connection-a sisterhood.Eloquent and approachable, this book deftly integrates the insights of a number of disciplines to provide a profound reconsideration of the relations between life and death. Sister Death also features a series of original works by the artist Krista Dragomer that stage an ongoing conceptual conversation with the text.