Cultural melancholy : readings of race, impossible mourning, and African American ritual

Resource Information

The work Cultural melancholy : readings of race, impossible mourning, and African American ritual represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in University of Missouri Libraries. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

Cultural melancholy : readings of race, impossible mourning, and African American ritual

Title remainder

readings of race, impossible mourning, and African American ritual

Statement of responsibility

Jermaine Singleton

Creator

• Singleton, Jermaine, 1974-

Author

• Singleton, Jermaine, 1974-

Subject

• American literature -- African American authors
• American literature -- African American authors | History and criticism
• Criticism, interpretation, etc
• Grief in literature
• Grief in literature
• HISTORY / Social History
• African Americans -- Race identity
• Mourning customs
• Mourning customs -- United States
• SOCIAL SCIENCE / Ethnic Studies / African American Studies
• United States
• History
• African Americans -- Race identity | History

Genre

• History
• Criticism, interpretation, etc

Language

eng

Summary

"A daring cultural and literary studies investigation, Cultural Melancholy explores the legacy of unresolved grief produced by ongoing racial oppression and resistance in the United States. Using acute analysis of literature, drama, musical performance, and films, Singleton demonstrates how rituals of racialization and resistance transfer and transform melancholy discreetly across time, consolidating racial identities and communities along the way. He also argues that this form of impossible mourning binds racialized identities across time and social space by way of cultural resistance efforts. Singleton develops the concept of "cultural melancholy" as a response to scholarship that calls for the separation of critical race studies and psychoanalysis, excludes queer theoretical approaches from readings of African American literatures and cultures, and overlooks the status of racialized performance culture as a site of serious academic theorization. In doing so, he weaves critical race studies, psychoanalysis, queer theory, and performance studies into conversation to uncover a host of hidden dialogues--psychic and social, personal and political, individual and collective--for the purpose of promoting a culture of racial grieving, critical race consciousness, and collective agency. Wide-ranging and theoretically bold, Cultural Melancholy counteracts the racial legacy effects that plague our twenty-first century multiculture"--

Assigning source

Provided by publisher

Cataloging source

DLC

Dewey number

810.9/896073

Government publication

government publication of a state province territory dependency etc

Illustrations

illustrations

Index

index present

LC call number

PS153.N5

LC item number

S553 2015

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

bibliography