Loss

Taking stock of a century of pervasive loss—of warfare, disease, and political strife—this eloquent book opens a new view on both the past and the future by considering "what is lost" in terms of "what remains." Such a perspective, these essays suggest, engages and reanimates history. Plumbing the cultural and political implications of loss, the authors--political theorists, film and literary critics, museum curators, feminists, psychoanalysts, and AIDS activists--expose the humane and productive possibilities in the workings of witness, memory, and melancholy.

Among the sites of loss the authors revisit are slavery, apartheid, genocide, war, diaspora, migration, suicide, and disease. Their subjects range from the Irish Famine and the Ottoman slaughter of Armenians to the aftermath of the Vietnam War and apartheid in South Africa, problems of partial immigration and assimilation, AIDS, and the re-envisioning of leftist movements. In particular, Loss reveals how melancholia can lend meaning and force to notions of activism, ethics, and identity.

David L. Eng is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Rutgers University. He is author of Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America (2001), as well as coeditor with Alice Y. Hom of Q & A: Queer in Asian America (1998), winner of a Lambda Literary Award and a Cultural Studies Book Award from the Association for Asian American Studies. His current book project, Queer Diasporas/Psychic Diasporas, explores the impact of transnational and queer social movements on family and kinship in the late twentieth century. David Kazanjian is Associate Professor of English at Queens College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. He is author of Articulating "America": Imperial Citizenship Before the Civil War (forthcoming).

Illustrations
Preface
Introduction: Mourning Remains
David L. Eng and David Kazanjian

I. Bodily Remains
Returning the Body without Haunting: Mourning "Nai Phi" and the End of Revolution in Thailand
Rosalind C. Morris

Black Mo’nin’
Fred Moten

Ambiguities of Mourning: Law, Custom, and Testimony of Women before South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission
Mark Sanders

Catastrophic Mourning
Marc Nichanian

Between Genocide and Catastrophe
David Kazanjian and Marc Nichanian

Passing Shadows: Melancholic Nationality and Black Critical Publicity in Pauline E. Hopkins’s Of One Blood
Dana Luciano

Melancholia and Moralism
Douglas Crimp

II. Spatial Remains
The Memory of Hunger
David Lloyd

Remains to Be Seen: Reading the Works of Dean Sameshima and Khanh Vo
Susette Min

Mourning Becomes Kitsch: The Aesthetics of Loss in Severo Sarduy’s Cobra
Vilashini Cooppan

Theorizing the Loss of Land: Griqua Land Claims in Southern Africa, 1874–1998
David Johnson

Left Melancholy
Charity Scribner

III. Ideal Remains
All Things Shining
Kaja Silverman

A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia
David L. Eng and Shinhee Han

Passing Away: The Unspeakable (Losses) of Postapartheid South Africa
Yvette Christiansë

Ways of Not Seeing: (En)gendered Optics in Benjamin, Baudelaire, and Freud
Alys Eve Weinbaum

Legacies of Trauma, Legacies of Activism: ACT UP’s Lesbians
Ann Cvetkovich

Resisting Left Melancholia
Wendy Brown

Afterword: After Loss, What Then?
Judith Butler
Contributors
Index