Cultural Melancholy: Readings of Race, Impossible Mourning, and African American Ritual

by Jermaine Singleton

Overview

A daring cultural and literary studies investigation, Cultural Melancholy explores the legacy of unresolved grief produced by ongoing racial oppression and resistance in the United States. Using acute analysis of literature, drama, musical performance, and film, Singleton demonstrates how rituals of racialization and resistance transfer and transform melancholy discreetly across time, consolidating racial identities and communities along the way. He also argues that this form of impossible mourning binds racialized identities across time and social space by way of cultural resistance efforts.

Singleton develops the concept of "cultural melancholy" as a response to scholarship that calls for the separation of critical race studies and psychoanalysis, excludes queer theoretical approaches from readings of African American literatures and cultures, and overlooks the status of racialized performance culture as a site of serious academic theorization. In doing so, he weaves critical race studies, psychoanalysis, queer theory, and performance studies into conversation to uncover a host of hidden dialogues—psychic and social, personal and political, individual and collective—for the purpose of promoting a culture of racial grieving, critical race consciousness, and collective agency.

Wide-ranging and theoretically bold, Cultural Melancholy counteracts the racial legacy effects that plague our twenty-first century multiculture.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780252039621
Publisher:	University of Illinois Press
Publication date:	11/12/2015
Edition description:	1st Edition
Pages:	168
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Jermaine Singleton is an associate professor of English at Hamline University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1

1 The Melancholy That Is Not Her Own: The Evolution of the Blueswoman and the Consolidation of Whiteness 27

2 Reconstituted Melancholy: Impossible Mourning and the Prevalence of Ritual and Race in August Wilson's The Piano Lesson 49

3 The Melancholy of Faith: Reading the Gendered and Sexual Politics of Testifying in James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain and The Amen Corner 65

4 Queering Celie's Same-Sex Desire: Impossible Mourning, Trauma, and Heterosexual Failure in Alice Walker's The Color Purple 83

5 A Clearing beyond the Melancholic Haze: Staging Racial Grieving in Suzan-Lori Parks's Venus and Tony Kushner's Caroline, or Change 99

Coda: On Conformity to the Category of Time (Race) 119

Notes 125

Bibliography 135

Index 145

Editorial Reviews

"Jermaine Singleton's Cultural Melancholy is a provocative book that will be well-received in the field of racial melancholia studies, and there is no doubt in my mind that it makes an excellent contribution to performance studies."—Abdul R. JanMohamed, University of California, Berkeley


"Interesting, fluid, and compelling. Singleton marshals the relevant research on racial mourning and historical trauma to focus specifically on how performance affects the process of working through."—Gwen Bergner, author of Taboo Subjects: Race, Sex, and Psychoanalysis

From the Publisher