Cultures of Melancholia: Theorizing Desire and the Black Body
Cultures of Melancholia: Theorizing Desire and the Black Body
Drawing on critical theories of postcolonial melancholia (Gilroy, Cheng, Khanna), this chapter discusses the ‘re-memory’ of loss – both personal and cultural – as allowing the emergence of embodied black desire in Toni Morrison’s oeuvre. In particular, it rereads A Mercy as a representation of a “protoculture of melancholia,” in which all characters, across class, gender, and racial lines are haunted by memories not merely of loss but also of pleasure and eroticism. Melancholia as creative rather than as mourning without end becomes a healing process resulting in the assertion of the black body and of the black subject’s agency.
Keywords: A Mercy, black body, black desire, black woman, Dionne Brand, eroticism, loss, melancholia, neo-slave narrative, Toni Morrison
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