AMST 415
Racial Melancholia, Queer Melancholia Spring 2025
Division II Writing Skills Difference, Power, and Equity
Cross-listed WGSS 418 / AAS 415

The psychoanalytic theory of melancholia–the ways in which one refuses to fully let go of that which one has lost–is a foundational concept to the fields of ethnic studies, queer theory, and cultural studies. In the wake of losses due variously to histories of forced migration and slavery, the AIDS epidemic, war, and social exclusion, various scholars and critics have posited melancholia as a structuring condition of contemporary life as subjects differently navigate loss, displacement, and exclusion. Theories of racial and queer melancholia have emerged as supple frameworks through which to consider how queer and racialized subjects hold onto non-normative ways of being, relation, and sociality against the normalizing tides of erasure. We will chart out a connection between how we relate to and apprehend the past as it then pertains to how we relate to and apprehend others. Beginning with a dive into Freudian psychoanalysis, this seminar will explore concepts of loss and melancholia and their uptake into critical theory, critical race theory, and queer theory/queer of color critique. Alongside our scholarly inquiries, we will engage with a range of art, literature, performance, and film that explore topics of memory, trauma, migration, the queer past and the queer future, subjectivity, relationality, and gender and sexuality.