| "Empowering the Past: Mourning and Melancholia in Twentieth-Century African American Literature" explores representations of loss, grief, and melancholia in contemporary African American novels. It rereads and revisits Freud-based Western theories of melancholia through the lens of African American cultural expressions. Traditional Western assessments of melancholia view melancholia as an unhealthy and pathological form of lingering in grief. In light of African American literature's portrayals of losses, I critique assessments of melancholia that view it purely in terms of pathology. African American literary production has turned to depictions of black melancholy characters, I argue, as an expression of cultural and political resistance. Contrary to Freud-based Western understandings of melancholia as improperly unresolved grief that erodes the healthy self, African American literature has explored black melancholia as one way of asserting the existence of an oppressed black subject. In the context of historical and cultural denials of black subjectivity, African American literary representations of black melancholia affirm the subject: they prove its existence by pointing to the black self in its wounded form. African American literary portrayals of black melancholic characters thus problematize and politicize the suppression of African American identity. I also explore the black literary portrayal of white racially motivated melancholia as a means of subjection of an African American character and theorize the politics of desire in African American novels depicting racially structured societies. Chapters in the dissertation undertake extensive explorations of the intersections and interactions of trauma, melancholia, and the state of the subject in African American literature as well as close readings of Toni Morrison's Beloved, Octavia Butler's Kindred, Tina McElroy Ansa's Ugly Ways, and Randall Kenan's A Visitation of Spirits. In reading each novel, my analysis engages questions of race, gender, or sexual orientation and the role these parameters play in contributing to the resistance a certain character exercises through her or his melancholia. |
