Postcolonial Melancholia Research Articles

Leonora Sansay’s Secret History; or, The Horrors of St. Domingo and Frames of Personhood

ABSTRACT Leonora Sansay’s Secret History; or, The Horrors of St. Domingo (1808), which recounts the culmination of the Haitian revolution against French colonialism (1791–1804), evokes a nostalgia for colonial order even though colonialism would remain in the Caribbean for decades. The epistolary novel’s narrator, an American visiting Saint Domingue (colonial Haiti), yearns for the “paradise” that she imagines has been destroyed by the revolution, aligning Sansay with Paul Gilroy’s notion of postcolonial melancholia. More insidiously, in Secret History, the longing for the reinstatement of the colonial system in Saint Domingue positions people of African descent outside “frames of recognition,” as Judith Butler in Frames of War conceptualizes the way in which biopolitical forces constitute personhood. I argue that for Sansay, the norms that constitute a living being as recognizable as a life are the ideologies of Romantic settler colonialism, as well as American exceptionalism. As such, within Secret History, Sansay reifies a stratified racial and national hierarchy while also actively denying the state violence that sustains it.

Are tradition and modernity antagonistic? Ambedkar in and against the postcolonial project

ABSTRACT This paper attempts to demystify the antagonistic relationship between modernity and tradition as construed by Ashis Nandy. As a prominent voice in postcolonial scholarship, Nandy saw modernity as a colonial conception of rights, self, and society. Nandy’s critique of modernity laid the grounds for several projects that rejected the modern consensus for its colonial origins. Juxtaposing Nandy’s reiteration of early anti-modern nationalist thought with a multi-dimensional reading of colonial modernity in contemporary Ambedkarite scholarship, this paper explores the ambivalences of negotiating modern liberalism in a postcolonial order of hierarchical group identities. Despite the close imbrication of modernity with the imperial centre, Ambedkarite scholarship demonstrated how B.R. Ambedkar, synthesized a middle ground, where he incorporated the promise of modernity to liberate the ‘individual’ without dismissing the ‘communal’ collective self, construed by traditions. While postcolonial scholarship is heterogeneous, following Nandy, huge postcolonial melancholia has conflated modernity with coloniality. How do we rethink postcolonial theory from its current culturalist posturing to (re)claim the emancipatory potential of both modernity and tradition? Could it be that Nandy’s anxiety and discomfort with modernity fail to ‘contemporise theory’?

The Nightmare Island: Representations of St. Barthélemy in Swedish Novels

The Nightmare Island: Representations of St. Barthélemy in Swedish Novels

Postcolonial hauntings in riverine London: conviviality and melancholia

ABSTRACT In his 2000 book, Between Camps, and its 2005 follow-up, Postcolonial Melancholia, Paul Gilroy described postcolonial melancholia—a failure to mourn the loss of imperial prestige—and conviviality—the messy and banal navigation of fractally complex but increasingly less meaningful lines of difference in the city—as two opposing but related characteristics of the British urban experience at the dawn of the century. Nowhere is this more evident than in the neighbourhoods of riverine East London, whose identity and urban morphology have been shaped by the river running through them, upriver to the heart of the imperial metropolis and downriver to Britain’s extensive colonies and postcolonies. In these long-standing arrival quarters, the structure of feeling includes two elements in tension with each other: a mode of lament expressing a form of morbid attachment to the perceived greatness of the imperial age, whose ghostly afterlife is etched in the monumental architecture of London’s boroughs and inscribed in the names of its streets and buildings; and a fragile emergent form of convivial coexistence that finds resonance in alternative narratives of the imperial past. Gidley’s article addresses these issues through data from long-standing research engagement with Bermondsey and Deptford on the southern shore and with Barking on the northern shore of the Thames.

Andrea Levy, in Memoriam ed. by Henghameh Saroukhani, Sarah Lawson Welsh, and Michael Perfect

Reviewed by: Andrea Levy, in Memoriam ed. by Henghameh Saroukhani, Sarah Lawson Welsh, and Michael Perfect Corrine Collins ANDREA LEVY, IN MEMORIAM, edited by Henghameh Saroukhani, Sarah Lawson Welsh, and Michael Perfect. A special issue of ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, 53, No. 1–2, 2022. 330 pp. This special issue of ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature commemorates the life and work of Black British writer Andrea Levy and is the inaugural issue of what editors call “Levy studies” (p. 11). Henghameh Saroukhani, Sarah Lawson Welsh, and Michael Perfect dedicate the issue and Levy studies to the “significance of [Levy’s] aesthetic and political legacy” (p. 9). The editors state that their desired focus for subsequent scholarship is to take more seriously Levy’s transnational and outer-national significance, and they selected the Canadian journal ARIEL to highlight the ways Levy’s work is also connected to places outside of the Caribbean that have been shaped by the British empire (p. 11). While Levy’s work has become increasingly prominent and celebrated in Britain, marked by not only the popularity of her novels but also their adaptations for screen and theater, the editors are invested in critiques and analyses that also challenge the ways her work has been taken up. The special issue [End Page 178] is a blueprint for the kinds of scholarship the editors hope will occupy the space of Levy studies, and it includes a range of contributions that examine Levy’s multimodal work. The issue includes scholarly critiques, essays on pedagogy, reflections on Levy’s life, and previously unpublished works, all grounded in the study of Levy as a writer invested in the violent entanglements of empire. In the foreword, Black British presenter and journalist Gary Younge recalls a conversation he had with Levy about the importance of place. Levy frequently wrote about North London and the places and cultures that influence it and Britain; her work is invested in the Caribbean as a firm, central, and important part of British history through legacies of colonization, enslavement, and migration. Despite the geographic terrain that Levy’s work traverses, she herself lived all her life in North London. During their conversation, Younge suggested that writers who stay in place are burdened with insularity, to which Levy challenged, “What is so inherently great about moving around and living in different places?” (p. 1). Younge concludes that Levy’s relationship to place should cause us all to rethink the ways that places are connected across time and space, and the special issue urges readers to take the transnational nature of Levy’s work more seriously than ever before. Levy’s transnational approach threads through the issue, providing the context for her later work on television and many of the scholarly essays included in the collection. Challenging Britain’s narrative of empire is central to Levy studies, and in “July’s People: Adoption and Kinship in Andrea Levy’s Fiction,” John McLeod argues that Levy’s work is continually engaged in the genealogical work of empire, in particular understanding its impact on private and public institutions. The editors advocate a renewed focus on Levy’s resistance to narratives of transformation to assert that her work is polemical, even as it has been used in the British national imaginary to create a sense of national identity and belonging. Fiona Tolan and Vedrana Veličković read some of Levy’s novels as narratives of imperial and post-colonial melancholia and argue that these novels do not present hopes for a racially and culturally integrated Britain but rather a Britain that should remain under scrutiny for its treatment of British Caribbean subjects, a key point that is overlooked in mainstream uptakes of Levy’s work. Deirdre Osborne makes similar observations in “Sites and Sightlines: Staging Andrea Levy’s Small Island,” which examines the cross-genre interplay between the novel Small Island (2004), its adaptation for theater, and Levy’s self-narrated audiobook. These essays examine the ways that Levy is taken up and understood by British audiences and builds on previous scholarship on Levy’s public reception as a Black writer, challenging her reputation as someone who is not...

Where I Have Never Been: Migration, Melancholia, and Memory in Asian American Narratives of Return by Patricia Chu

Reviewed by: Where I Have Never Been: Migration, Melancholia, and Memory in Asian American Narratives of Return by Patricia Chu Hong Zeng Patricia Chu. Where I Have Never Been: Migration, Melancholia, and Memory in Asian American Narratives of Return. Temple UP, 2019. ix + 255 pp. Patricia Chu's Where I Have Never Been: Migration, Melancholia, and Memory in Asian American Narratives of Return breaks new ground in Asian American studies in the following senses. First, it is the first book to devote itself exclusively to the study of diasporic Asian American narratives of return, specifically, the narratives of later-generation Asian Americans who visit their parents' and ancestors' homeland. Previously, Asian American studies predominantly focused on diasporic Asian American assimilation efforts, in the vein of postcolonial study: "Asian American Studies, focused on immigration and social justice within the United States, has historically marginalized the stories of educated Chinese who studied here and returned to China" (6). Second, the book's methodology is syncretic and uniquely combines postcolonial study, Sigmund Freud's and Franz Fanon's theories [End Page 593] on melancholy and mourning, and genre studies of autobiography and travel writing. Third, the book explores important critical terms such as racial melancholy, postimperial and postcolonial melancholy, and countermemory and postmemory. The book also discloses the relevance of these terms to Asian American narratives of return. Last, the book provides new insight into Chinese history and Asian American history through its unique lens of the narratives of return, written by diasporic Asian Americans who possess a double vision of two cultures. As a result, the book helps to decolonize the study of Asian history and draw global attention to Asian American culture and identity. An overview of chapters bespeaks the originality of Chu's materials and syncretic research approach. Chapter 1 establishes this syncretic method and introduces the narrative of return as a genre of literary memorial related to other transnational or global Asian American studies. It discusses genre, racial melancholia, postcolonial melancholia, types of return migration, and conventions of travel narration. Chapter 2 studies the historian Josephine Khu's 2001 collection of personal essays written by the children of diasporic Chinese settled around the world. It examines these writers' evolving sense of self, culture, and identity through meeting family in China. Chu perceptively analyzes these narrators' racial melancholia, which arise from conflicts between their cultural legacies and personal choices. Chapter 3 examines Lisa See's On Gold Mountain: The One-hundred-Year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family, a memoir about the multiple generations of See's mixed-race family. Chu underscores the fictional narrative tools that See employs to distill imagination and personality into the historical archive of family members she had not seen. According to Chu, See's work manifests the typical migration patterns and "Chineseness" (74) of merchant-class Chinese. Chapter 4 and 5 explores the family memoirs of Denise Chong and Winberg and May-lee Chai. Chu studies how Chong's work manifests the racial melancholy that, after arising from her grandparents' (Canadian Chinese laborers) inability to achieve oversea success—by being excluded based on gender from fulfilling careers and being trapped in household chores—was passed onto their descendants. The text both registers and combats this melancholia through narration and countermemory. The Chais' intergenerational story examines the postcolonial melancholy of the narrator's parents. Their parents, educated in the US, went back to China to help with the construction of the country but found that the liberal democratic [End Page 594] ideas they learned from the US could not be applied to China in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, so they ultimately returned to the US. However, their attachment to China formed a chasm with their solely American-educated daughter. Thus, the Chais' parents represent the cultural identity and postcolonial melancholy of diasporic Chinese culture elites. Chapter 6 studies the 1909 memoir of Jung Wing, the first Chinese graduate of an American university, a diplomat who organized the late Qing study-abroad movement. According to Chu, Wing exhibits a deimperialization in his attack of Qing government, as well as a decolonization in his criticism of Western imperialism. Chu argues incisively that Wing's melancholia is...

(Un)learning theatre through stories of growing up: difference and multiplicity in Singapore

ABSTRACT This article considers the value of growing up stories among theatre practitioners in Singapore as a resource for learning theatre in multicultural contexts. It engages with the lived experiences of five Singapore theatre practitioners, Alfian Sa’at, Alvin Tan, Haresh Sharma, Kok Heng Leun and Ong Keng Sen, whose contributions to discourses on multiplicity and performance are significant in the city–state and internationally. Concepts of ‘Open Culture’ (Kuo. 1998. “Contemplating an Open Culture: Transcending Multiracialism.” In Singapore: Re-Engineering Success, edited by Arun Mahiznan, and Lee Tsao Yuan, 55–60. Singapore: Oxford University Press), ‘postcolonial conviviality’ (Gilroy. 2005. Postcolonial Melancholia. New York: Columbia University Press) and ‘critical multiculturalism’ (Goh. 2009. “Conclusion: Toward a Critical Multiculturalism.” In Race and Multiculturalism in Malaysia and Singapore, edited by Daniel P.S. Goh, 213–218. London: Routledge) are proposed as useful frames for understanding theatre in multicultural contexts, and from which the idea of a ‘bricoleur imagination’ is derived.

The Crisis of Brexit and Other Socio-Cultural Aspects of Silencing the Past through the Example of Anna Burns’ Milkman

The present article scrutinizes the phenomenon of a systemic silencing of the past visible in recent socio-political challenges caused by Brexit, especially in the case of the Irish border. Due to the comparative character of the paper, the attention is targeted at a symptomatic amnesia manifested on the British and Northern Irish sides. Postcolonial melancholia, to use Paul Gilroy’s term, facilitated by a systemic whitewashing of British imperial past, is contrasted here with Northern Irish postcolonial amnesia understood as a personal and institutionalised suppression of the difficult memory of colonisation and violence. In what follows, the paper aims to show how these two phenomena meet in the conflict of Brexit and how literature comments on the current political, social and cultural issues such as Brexit based on the example of Anna Burns’ novel Milkman (2018). The article discusses the silence which has surrounded the issue of the Irish Border in Brexit debates, as well as looks at the Northern Irish reluctance to talk about their past as an unsuccessful attempt to escape the demons of the past.

Postimperial Melancholia and Brexit

The lead-up to and the aftermath of the 2016 referendum on the United Kingdom’s membership in the European Union have been characterized by particular psychic reactions and affective states: shock, perplexity, anxiety, guilt, paranoia, anger, depression, delusion, and manic elation. The debate over Brexit has played out largely in an affective register. Scholars and journalists in search of explanations have reached for psychological concepts such as amnesia and have cited feelings, specifically nostalgia and anger, as major factors. Paul Gilroy’s Postcolonial Melancholia provides a more useful analytical framework for constructing histories of Brexit beyond the usual narratives of reversal, unexpected rupture, or liberation, and for unearthing the psychic attachments and affective dynamics underlying such narratives. Gilroy’s conception of postimperial melancholia allows us to see the links between Brexit, anti-immigrant racism, and the obsession with national identity, and the unacknowledged and ongoing legacies of empire and decolonization in contemporary Britain.

British migrants in Berlin: negotiating postcolonial melancholia and racialised nationalism in the wake of Brexit

ABSTRACT World War II nostalgia in the UK is mired in a postcolonial melancholia that not only fuels Brexit nationalism, but carries implications for how the UK relates to the European Continent. This paper presents an empirically engaged examination of Gilroy’s concept of postcolonial melancholia by exploring how British migrants negotiate this “complex ailment”. Engaging with empirical research conducted with British migrants in Berlin, I will examine how migrants negotiate this form of nationalism through their relationships with family members in the UK. The particular position of the British migrant in Germany illuminates how postcolonial melancholia’s entrenchment shapes British nationalism and Britain’s relationship to mainland Europe. It explores discourses of British exceptionalism before examining how Brexit’s foregrounding of empire nostalgia pushes migrants to redefine their relationship to Britain. Meanwhile, black British migrants inhabit a different orientation to the postcolonial through their practical engagement with complex colonial histories.

Towards a theoretical synergy: Critical race theory and decolonial thought in Trumpamerica and Brexit Britain

This article argues for a theoretical synergy between critical race theory (CRT) and decolonial thought. The author propounds that while CRT and decolonial thought have different scopes, we can synergize them in analysis. Specifically, decolonial thought’s transnational focus on coloniality complements CRT’s ‘presentist’ focus on national racialized social systems. The author displays the efficacy of this theoretical synergy by discussing Brexit Britain and Trumpamerica. While CRT is helpful for analysing how these political projects built upon contemporary post-racial ideology and racialized emotions, it struggles to deal with the postcolonial melancholia that runs through both political moments. Decolonial thought is thus required to tease out the transnational, historical dynamics of coloniality embodied in Brexit Britain and Trumpamerica. This is particularly apparent in the way both projects involve a desire to return the nation to its imperial glory, and to keep those who are deemed to be opposed to Western civilization – particularly ‘the Muslim’ – outside of the nation’s borders.

Imperial pasts, dystopian futures, and the theatre of Brexit

ABSTRACT Even though traditionally a major analyst of the status quo of the British nation, British theatre has barely responded to Brexit. Two recent plays that seem to have captured the Brexit zeitgeist particularly well look towards the past: whereas Albion (2017), Mike Bartlett’s take on the country house drama, depicts an Englishness nostalgically mourning its long-lost colonial prowess, Jez Butterworth’s dissection of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, The Ferryman (2017), appears dystopian as anxieties surrounding the Good Friday Agreement in a post-Brexit scenario resurface. Both plays, this article argues, situate Brexit as firmly rooted in Paul Gilroy’s notion of “postcolonial melancholia”. They suggest that it is only through confronting its imperial past that Britain can begin to address vital questions concerning the current state of the nation: constructions of selfhood versus Otherness, and the intertwinement of the domestic and the political, as well as the mythical nature of national identities.

“Eastern Europeans” and BrexLit

ABSTRACT This article examines the representations of “Eastern European” migration in contemporary BrexLit, focusing on Adam Thorpe’s Missing Fay (2017), Amanda Craig’s The Lie of the Land (2017), Carla Grauls’s Occupied (2012), Andrew Muir’s The Session (2015), and Agnieszka Dale’s short stories. Drawing on Paul Gilroy’s work on postcolonial melancholia, and extending Kristian Shaw’s “BrexLit” definition by focusing on stereotyping, it shows how the figure of the Eastern European migrant exposes unresolved anxieties around a presumed British cultural superiority, race, and empire. The arrival of Eastern Europeans and the increasing Brexodus of their “cheap labour” enables a reflection on the health of the nation – something is, indeed, rotten in post-Brexit Britain – as well as on unresolved legacies of empire that underpin the Brexit crisis. The article also analyses several promising responses from Polish British writers who interrogate the problematic staleness of these representations and take them into a much-needed new direction.

Racialized Affectivities of (Un)Belonging: Mixed (Race) Couples in the Shadow of Brexit

This paper explores the affective economy of (un)belonging, revealed by the UK decision to withdraw from the European Union (EU). Emerging social science research on so-called ‘Brexit’ focuses on the anticipated effects of a stricter UK immigration regime on the lives of EU citizens and families. Against the background of the country’s postcolonial melancholia, and drawing from my ethnographic fieldwork in England (2018–2019), this paper discusses how British and mixed-migration status, mixed (race) couples narrate the impact of the poll’s outcome on their affective orientations towards the UK and the EU. It shows how race inflects partners’ different perception of Brexit as a historical rupture or as an event in a continuum; as a loss of entitlement to mobility in space, or of the legitimacy of permanence in place; as a lingering danger, or a magnifier of existing patterns of violence. By putting Black and mixed-race partners’ narratives center stage, this paper traces three scenes of expression of their perceived contested and precarious belonging: the ordinariness of racism in the UK, the mistrust in the durability of the boundaries of inclusion drawn by the British state, and a heightened alertness for fear of escalating racist and homophobic violence.

‘Dover Beach’ and the uncertain afterlife of Victorian environments

ABSTRACT Ian McEwan was among the writers, historians, and philosophers from twenty-one countries who signed a letter published last year in papers across Europe that warned of the rising tide of anti-liberalism and ersatz-populism threatening ‘disdain for intelligence and culture; explosions of xenophobia and antisemitism; disaster.’ One signatory, Orhan Pamuk, said, ‘Without the idea of Europe, freedom, women’s rights, democracy, egalitarianism is hard to defend in my part of the world’ (Henley and Rice-Oxley). Fifteen years earlier, Paul Gilroy’s Postcolonial Melancholia decried the waning of international solidarity ‘in the era of actually existing internationalism which has perversely created an environment where cosmopolitanism and translocal affiliations became suspect and are now virtually unthinkable outside of the limited codes of human-rights talk, medical emergency, and environmental catastrophe’ (5). In the years since, the contradiction has only sharpened. This perverse internationalism—neoliberal global capitalism coupled with the rise of various right-wing nationalisms—has gone a fair way to eliminating the social environment in which even climate change and the mass extinction of plants and animals matter across borders. While on the right side of this moment in history, both McEwan and Gilroy have thought quite a lot about Matthew Arnold’s iconic ‘Dover Beach’ in this context and, in their different ways, got it rather wrong. In this context, that of the last few hundred years and its relation to the last few decades, I will examine ‘Dover Beach’ and the afterlife of its Victorian environments. The Dover poet’s exclamatory turn to romantic love in stanza four is not simply an ‘inward turn’ away from public concerns, a ‘defensive gesture’ against warfare and turbulence as Gilroy argues. Our individual and collective need for love, an insistence on this truth, and those that follow from it, is, I will argue, always social and has real political value.

Emotions, finances and independence. Uranium as a “happy object” in the Greenlandic debate on secession from Denmark

AbstractAnalysing the Danish-Greenlandic debate on Greenland’s plans to extract and export uranium, the article advocates bringing the fields of extraction studies and cultural studies into dialogue. Drawing on discourse analysis, critical theory and the “emotional turn” in social sciences, the article demonstrates how the current discussion about secession is linked to a Danish-Greenlandic affective economy instituted during the colonial era. Conceived as the antithesis to the unhappy condition of present postcoloniality, independence has become the ultimate political goal for the Greenlandic nation. The reasoning is that history has made the Greenlanders citizens in a foreign nation, which has left them in a state of alienation. In order to lock colonialism away firmly in the past and attain future happiness, the Greenlanders must attain statehood. Uranium is supposed to promote this goal and is thus circulated as a “happy object”, positioning opponents of uranium mining as “affect aliens” or “killjoys” in the independence discourse. In Denmark, the Greenlandic detachment has led to “postcolonial melancholia” – and to a greater receptiveness to the Greenland desire for equality. In Greenland, disappointed expectations of rapid economic progress and growing distrust of large-scale projects have sparked a discussion about the significations of the concept of “independence”.

Racial nationalisms: Brexit, borders and Little Englander contradictions

ABSTRACTThis Introduction first proposes a definitional map applicable to the racial nationalisms currently ascendant in Britain (and Western Europe, more broadly). The paper then outlines the respective contributions to the Special Issue – with an emphasis on the politics of bordering that organizes today so much of nationalism's claim on the state. The second half thereupon establishes a wider conjunctural context within which such analyses can be most productively read. Drawing on Stuart Hall's formative analysis, we argue that it is an understanding of the distinctly contradictory drives intrinsic to recent capitalism that is required. Through mapping the uneasy nation/market bind constitutive of the “Little Englander” political subjectivity that Thatcherism forged, this section focuses on the “disjuncture” that has emerged in the intervening period: a disjuncture, compounded by complementary forms of “postcolonial melancholia”, that has seen the various nationalist drives in the body politic obtain today a more pronounced political autonomy.

Ontological Insecurities and Postcolonial Imaginaries

In this article, I address the particular narratives and discourses that respond to increased feelings of uncertainty, anxiety, and fear, so-called ontological insecurities, and their connections to the postcolonial imaginaries of populist politics. Recent focus on post-truth politics and alternative facts point to some underlying questions concerning the emotional appeal of particular social imaginaries, such as the appeal and resonance of certain discourses and narratives, as well as the ways in which specific discourses and narratives grip and take an emotional hold of a subject. Of particular importance in terms of populist politics is why specific imaginaries ultimately come together in the imagined object of the other—in this case, the immigrant and/or the refugee other. To understand how power works through emotional discourses and narratives, I discuss how they come to naturalize colonial fears and postcolonial melancholia, played out in myths about “the nation,” “the people,” “the establishment,” and “the immigrant others,” but also how such myths justify the imagined ills of Western society and how they constitute both remedies to and origins of ontological insecurities.

Tense and the other: Temporality and urban multiculture in Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand

Expressions of concern about the national future, or the surfacing of history through postcolonial melancholia and nostalgia for a lost Golden Age, illustrate how temporality and tense have been absorbed into discourses, affective attachments and practices of cultural recognition and national belonging. First, this paper aims to develop the discussion of urban multiculture in human geography in an original direction through a theoretically‐driven argument for the significance of social divisions of tense. It contributes new knowledge about the availability of this discursive field when the issue of cultural recognition arises. Second, through considering the relational dynamics between settler, Indigenous and exogenous peoples together, the paper ties together debate on migration and ethnicity with indigeneity and colonialism. Third, the paper emphasises the importance of careful attention to local histories, contexts and oppressions when researching conviviality and multiculture in a settler colonial context. The analysis draws on 12 months of qualitative research with first‐generation British migrants in Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand to examine several illustrative encounters of British migrants with Māori, the Indigenous peoples, and exogenous alterity, a term used to refer to migrants and racialised citizens deemed “foreign.”

Kazuo Ishiguro and the Remains of Empire

ABSTRACTHaving won the 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature, Kazuo Ishiguro’s international status is more secure than ever. The prestige of this prize, however, serves to shore up its own institutional capital, citing Ishiguro’s allegedly universal humanism to do so while belying the kind of critical work that his novels actually carry out. This essay reads When We Were Orphans (2000), set between the turn of the twentieth century and the Second World War and focused on the opium trade in Shanghai, to show how the novel critically engages with the neocolonial conditions of its present. Read in light of Paul Gilroy’s notion of “postcolonial melancholia,” I argue that Ishiguro’s novel intervenes in the economic abuses afforded by unregulated multinational capitalism—structures that reflect the continuing legacies of colonialism itself—and that, ultimately, the novel locates alternative future forms of international belonging from within the degradations of an exploitative colonial history.