Psychic Unease and Unconscious Critical Agency: For an Anatomy of Postcolonial Melancholy

Traditionally in the West, Melancholia, connected to Saturn, the planet of spirit and thought, was considered in terms of speculative mood and attitude. In modernity, with the rise of psychiatry as a discipline, melancholia became a form of mental illness to be studied, categorized, and treated. Freud’s proposition that the failure to mourn a loss was the cause of melancholic depression represents a substantial departure from previous theories. In melancholia an emotional tie is replaced by an internalization of the lost object. Essentially loss becomes the primary field on which personality constructs itself: loss primarily of the mother, but also loss as a site of repetition which will structure the whole psychic life of the individual.
Since Freud, the debate upon the relation between melancholia and difficult-to-mourn losses has engaged the postcolonial theory. The affective turn in the social sciences and the humanities helps to evaluate the wide spectrum of its possible implications and meanings since despondency and despair inhabit not only the parental or the sentimental scenes. Historical circumstances can shape our psyches as powerfully as the first primeval experiences of deprivation and bereavement. In the lives of asylum-seekers, refugees, clandestine migrants, constantly in exile and in flight, difficult-to-mourn losses become a central feature of life in a way that fundamentally affects and maims the nature and structure of subjectivity. This essay discusses the following authors: British Asian Monica Ali; British Caribbean Indian V. S. Naipaul; Canadian Asian Rohinton Mistry; Cosmopolitan Indian: Kiran Desai