Depression is ordinary: Public feelings and Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother

Abstract

What if depression, in the Americas at least, could be traced to histories of colonialism, genocide, slavery, exclusion, and everyday segregation and isolation that haunt all of our lives, rather than to biochemical imbalances? This article seeks alternatives to the medical model found in most depression memoirs by considering how the epistemological and methodological struggles faced by a scholar of the African diaspora confronted by the absent archive of slavery are relevant to discussions of political depression. Combining scholarly investigation and personal memoir, Saidiya Hartman's Lose Your Mother exemplifies feminism's affective turn not only by bringing personal narrative into scholarship, but by seeking reparation for the past in the affective dynamics of cultural memory rather than in legal reform or state recognition. Stubbornly refusing to find solace in an African past before slavery, though, Hartman provides a model of emotional reparation in which feelings of loss and alienation persist. Her work suggests the relevance of political depression to both the ordinary life of racism and to what gets called clinical depression.

Feeling Down, Backward, and Machinic: Queer Theory and the Affective Turn

“…The engagement with affect theory has enabled queer scholars to interrogate the notions of pride, safety, and happiness that are in fact a result of the mainstream LGBTQ movement's troubling alliance with neoliberal capitalism, rather than the outcome of progressive politics or social transformation. Coming through the traditions of feminist, queer, and postcolonial critiques, the affective turn toward the framework of feeling down is not necessarily a new theoretical paradigm, but a continuation of the feminist analytical method that "the personal is political" and an extension of poststructuralist interventions in the binarisms of normality and antinormality, repression and liberation, and knowing and ignorance (Ahmed, 2004(Ahmed, /2014Cvetkovich, 2003Cvetkovich, , 2012Hemmings, 2005;Pedwell & Whitehead, 2012).…”

Affective life, “vulnerable” youths, and international volunteering in a residential care programme in Cusco, Peru

“…Notably, the evocations of affect in such work are influenced by non‐representational geographies as well as feminist, queer, and antiracist theorisations of feelings and embodiment related in particular to the “affective and reparative turn” in cultural criticism (Cvetkovich, 2012, p. 133; Koivunen et al, 2018, p. 5). The latter literature in particular has highlighted the need to consider people's affective investments in “off the radar” modes of politics in seemingly ordinary, mundane, or even domestic practices and ways of being:

As we have learned to think both more modestly and more widely about what counts as politics so that it includes, for example, cultural activism, academic institutions, and everyday and domestic life, it has become important to take seriously the institutions where we live (as opposed to always feeling like politics is somewhere else out there).

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“…The latter literature in particular has highlighted the need to consider people's affective investments in “off the radar” modes of politics in seemingly ordinary, mundane, or even domestic practices and ways of being:

As we have learned to think both more modestly and more widely about what counts as politics so that it includes, for example, cultural activism, academic institutions, and everyday and domestic life, it has become important to take seriously the institutions where we live (as opposed to always feeling like politics is somewhere else out there). (Cvetkovich, 2012, p. 133)

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Remembering Algeria: melancholy, depression and the colonising of the pieds-noirs

“…The effects of the inability to express sadness are profound: writing of what she calls West's 'emotional colour line', Ann Cvetkovich describes it as a catalyst for depression amongst both blacks and whites, with whites feeling, consciously or not, 'that their forms of sadness are incommensurable with those of the historically disenfranchised, an incommensurability that is lived affectively as alienation and hopelessness, as well as more clinical forms of these feelings, such as depression.' 21 Her perspective on racial melancholy takes conceptions of loss and trauma resulting from racism and de-dramatises them, translating them from the catastrophic into the plane of the everyday, where insidious structural forms of violence are lived. Her work has been received as provocative on a number of levels; here, it is worth noting that while her initial premise -that depression can be brought about by social causes rather than physical ones -is uncontroversial within a cultural studies context (although less so in daily life), the suggestion that colonial settler groups such as the pieds-noirs may share the sadness of victimhood is generally dismissed.…”

“…Traumatised by his inability to save a young Arab boy from an OAS attack, and fleeing FLN threats, the father arrives in Paris, assuming that his position and client contacts will translate into an important role at the company headquarters in Paris. The realisation that the company neither recognises nor values him, and that he must beg to obtain a junior post engenders a brutal reassessment of his status, and one which is repeated through the daily petty yet hostile encounters with French society, from the 'Mercadal = Torturer' notice left on his desk(21), to the verbal references to him as 'the butcher' which so confuse his daughter, who knows him to be an insurance salesman. Striving to build a life for his young family, Mercadal buys a house on a new estate and joins the commuter rat-race, only to findhimself ostracised and vilified by his new neighbours: 'The people here didn't like you.…”