Melancholia and other negativities

Abstract

At the heart of this article is the question: what might it mean for us to become literate in our mothers’ melancholia? Drawing on the ambivalence of two domestic scenes—its melancholia, its unbearability, its haptic residue—this article accesses a brown feminine and feminist lieux de memoir (place of memory). I argue that for brown immigrant daughters, feminism is inherited, not as rebukes, admonitions, endorsements, condemnations, but by entering the scene of violence, laterally, repetitively, reiteratively, vertiginously. In so doing, what we inherit might be understood as a poetics—a sensuous thought form, an undergirding system of citation, seeming arbitrariness and repetition (litany if you will), a haptic sensation of bearing the unbearable, of feeling the wretchedness, the torment, and the ethics that characterise our transgenerational diasporic inheritance.