The wound and the opening

Abstract

Joseph Winters’s Hope Draped in Black insists on the ethical imperative of resisting closure. Drawing on examples from Black literary and artistic traditions, Winters describes an ethos of “melancholic hope” that dwells in loss while remaining vulnerable to others and an unknowable future: a wound and an opening. Winters is captivated by the repetitions and ruptures that frustrate easy assumptions about healing or progress. In these reflections on Winters’s work, I consider the ambivalent role of repetition in practices of mourning untimely and unjust death, and suggest the possibility of rituals that create and perform melancholic hope.