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.
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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).
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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.