Hope Draped in Black

This book explores a complex set of themes regarding black identity construction and the co-constitutive realities of melancholy and hope. On this view, black racial subjects are hopeful because of their melancholia and not in spite of it. Black hope sublates (aufheben) melancholy, that is, preserves, cancels, transforms, and lifts it higher. Melancholic hope represents a creative appropriation of Freud’s famous distinction between mourning and melancholy, a healthy versus a pathological reaction to the loss of a love object. Draped in hope, melancholia becomes more than Freud ever imagined. Winters makes the case for a reconstructed and productive notion of melancholia. Here melancholy is not an inability to “get on” with life but a form of self-understanding and historical agency born of painful experiences of loss. Melancholic hope is black wisdom, a form of “disillusioned” understanding. This refusal to “get over it,” as the American vernacular would have it, empowers a gimlet-eyed critique of American optimism regarding present and future and amnesia regarding the past. Against the dominant American disposition of forgetful optimism, the subject of melancholic hope revisits the trauma, fingers the wound, and feels the pain of irremediable loss.

Aesthetics · Agency (philosophy) · Appropriation · Art · Epistemology · Identity (music) · Melancholia · Object (grammar) · Optimism · Psychoanalysis · Psychotherapist · Sociology · Subject (documents) · Philosophy · Psychology · Race, History, and American Society · Social Psychology