The grief afforded deaths varies by national and racial hierarchies of life value

Evidence

The sadistic Frank Moretti keeps a “Cabinet of Human Comedy” containing historical items commemorating cruelty: a letter by Stalin; a machete from the Rwandan genocide; shoes from an Armenian mass grave. Among his trove is a Dutch pistol from the forces that failed to protect the Muslim Bosniaks of Srebrenica from massacre in 1995. He remarks: “ ‘The Serbs killed eight thousand civilians left unprotected. And this Beretta … meant to protect all those people, never used.’ He was laughing. ‘That’s something, eh? Three thousand Americans die and it changes history. Eight and a half thousand Muslims die and it’s forgotten’ ” (134). In his own distorted way, Moretti is here calling attention to the disparity in what Judith Butler calls “grievability”: the degree to which lives lost can be publically recalled and commemorated. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 378

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces Butler’s concept of grievability as a critical tool.
• XREF: Butler’s grievability pairs with the reader’s ‘Small acts of decorum toward corpses’ interest.
• SHARE: The Moretti cabinet detail is darkly candy-like — a Nazi-like collector itemizing unequal grief — sendable to a friend into grotesque moral art.