Embodying industrial transitions: Melancholy loss, interrupted habit and transitional memory after the end of a coal mine

Abstract

Geographical and interdisciplinary literatures often focus on the enduring losses engendered by industrial closure and economic change, describing the moment of deindustrialisation as a cut in the fabric of history. In this imaginary, people and place become suspended in the past, through ‘melancholy’ logics of attachment, ruination and loss. The aim of this article is to reorient these melancholy temporalities by demonstrating memory's central, though perhaps paradoxical, role in transitioning bodies through the afterlife of economic closure. Alongside three stories from an empirical study of life after two coal mine closures in Australia and China, I look to theories of melancholy and habit—understood as embodied, preconscious forms of non‐representational memory—to explore workers' capacities to reorient and rebuild subjectivity in the wake of closure's interruptions and disorientations. I emphasise the work of memory in knitting together life after ‘the end’, through transitional processes of reckoning, acting and learning that engender changing bodily intensities and evaluations, and the possibility of a renewed sense of life as ordinary. Taken together, this article makes paired contributions to literatures on economic change and geographies of memory. By looking beyond linear narratives of rupture and decline, it recognises the afterlife of industrial closure as an intimate site of transition without losing sight of the past. By showing how even melancholy memories are imbricated in the production of altered presents and futures, it emphasises memory's parallax operation as an embodied force of differentiation.