The Twenty-First-Century Black Studies Turn to Melancholy

Abstract

This essay examines the turn to melancholy in African American theory and literary criticism in the early years of the twenty-first century. Recent texts such as Joseph Winters’s Hope Draped in Black: Race, Melancholy, and the Agony of Progress (2015) and Jermaine Singleton’s Cultural Melancholy: Readings of Race, Impossible Mourning, and African American Ritual (2015) are as generative as earlier treatments of melancholy and race, such as Anne Cheng’s The Melancholy of Race and Stephen Best’s “On Failing to Make the Past Present.” The unresolved, unsettled, inassimilable tension of past and present is the pulse of contemporary, post–Civil Rights movement African American literature. If melancholic hope has steadily been a tradition of black affect, what might make our present moment especially tied to black melancholic hope? The tension, in the first years of the century, between the barrier crushing signaled by the first black president and the crushing police violence that led to the Black Lives Matter movement dramatizes the merging of melancholy and hope in contemporary black affect. The merging of melancholy and hope, in twenty-first-century black studies, is producing crucial new ways of understanding the motion tied to stasis and the cultural work of collective melancholy.