Not Evil, Just Sad: Racial Melancholia and its Agonies

ABSTRACT

This commentary engages with Dhwani Shah’s clinical observations on racialized experiences of patients or people of color and of mixed race identity. The author suggests that the racialized ghosts, the unmourned losses or underinternalizations of inner representations, require a reanimating of hauntings. It is argued that racial melancholia reveals not only the problems of internalizations but more significantly an atmospheric death or disablement of culture, race or caste as racialized or minoritized communities endure the crisis of representation.

This article refers to:

When Racialized Ghosts Refuse to Become Ancestors: Tasting Loewald’s “Blood of Recognition” in Racial Melancholia and Mixed-Race Identities

View responses to this article:

“Step Through and Command the Islands to Exist”: Response to Commentaries by Lara Sheehi and Shifa Haq

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ One could also say that to the extent that a person, of minoritized identity, makes it to privileged institutions, they are unexceptional in structures of meritocracy. That is, the ones who make it to the top, betray their caste, gender, or racial histories to belong in places of pure excellence (read whiteness).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Shifa Haq

Shifa Haq is psychoanalytic psychotherapist and assistant professor of psychology in the School of Human Studies at Ambedkar University Delhi. She is the author of the book In Search of Return: Mourning the Disappearances in Kashmir (2021). She serves as an associate editor in the journals Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, and Psychoanalytic Dialogues.