Does grief possess an inherent meaning, or is its significance contingently produced? From the anonymous author of the Old English poem, “The Wanderer,” to George Elliot’s Middlemarch, grief—and the desire to obtain relief—have been central themes in global literature. Grief is understood as emotional distress involving profound regret over loss, remorse for past actions, or sorrow in response to personal or collective misfortune (OED). In her seminal work In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Christina Sharpe suggests that in the wake of grief “the past that is not past reappears, always, to rupture the present” (9). Grief, therefore, cannot be sequestered into discrete historical moments. Instead, it circulates continuously between past and present, structuring both individual affect and collective social life. Furthermore, grief is not a purely private response to loss, but a culturally mediated experience constrained within the same framework of power that describes death itself. To elaborate, according to Foucault, death—and by extension, grief—is not merely a natural event, but a force relation which shapes society. Both are biopolitical tools that modify and interfere with natural life while shaping discourse and institutional regulation. Grief in this expanded sense goes beyond an individual emotional response to loss, becoming a relational practice whereby communities negotiate inherited violences and shape cultural memory. It also becomes a subject of analytical inquiry, inviting such questions as: How does grief cause temporal rupture? How does it result in affective continuity and shape the conditions of the present? Moreover, how does it impact our understanding of accountability and help envision a future of reparation? Finally, how is grief or trauma embodied, represented, contested, and reimagined, and what is the role of interdisciplinary scholarship and creative work in its articulation and conception?