Abstract
This article investigates racial melancholia as a comparative literary device in Claire de Duras’s Ourika (1823) and Hugh Clifford’s Saleh (1904). Racial melancholia refers to the process whereby racial self-knowledge becomes a site of psychological trauma for colonized subjects. In both novels, the European educations of Ourika, a West African girl, and Saleh, a Malay prince, lead to their development of racial melancholia and their eventual deaths. European education is blamed as the cause of this deadly melancholia. Yet both stories have different moral centres: one uses racial melancholia to argue for a universal humanism, while the other asserts that cultural difference is fixed and unchangeable. This article draws on psychoanalysis, race theory and postcolonial theory to analyse the charged symbols of racial melancholia and European education across the Francophone and Anglophone colonial empires.
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