Afghanistan, Racial Melancholia, and Loss That Exceeds Loss

Abstract

What does it mean for mourning and racial melancholia to inhabit (and exceed) the geography of Afghanistan, structured by serial wars and serial foreign occupations? As Afghans are subjected to immense forms of loss, what forms of melancholia take hold? This article builds on the critical scholarship on racial melancholia and mourning with a focus on the decades-long (and ongoing) US war and occupation of Afghanistan and considers how to think with loss that exceeds loss. Yet this is not a chronicling of the material and other losses that have transpired in Afghanistan, their quantifications, or thick (or even thin) descriptions of the serial deaths, sufferings, hardships, and forms of degradation over the past forty-five years. When summoned to evidence Afghan pain and Afghan injury, for whose recognition does one catalog this loss and to what end? In refusing to narrate loss with the requisite ethnographic and other authority, this article interrogates the demand for evidence of loss, and signals the decades of refusal to attend to Afghanistan as a place being brutalized. While refusing to narrate loss, the article demands sitting with the Afghans who are living and those who have left this world, introducing the Afghan corpse as witness to the violence of serial imperial war, and witness to the violence of Afghanistan as erasure.