The Melancholia of Class

The Melancholia of Class PDF Author: Cynthia Cruz
Publisher: Watkins Media Limited
ISBN: 1913462277
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
What does it mean to be working-class in a middle-class world? Cynthia Cruz shows us how class affects culture and our mental health and what we can do about it -- calling not for assimilation, but for annihilation. To be working-class in a middle-class world is to be a ghost. Excluded, marginalised, and subjected to violence, the working class is also deemed by those in power to not exist. We are left with a choice between assimilation into middle-class values and culture, leaving our working-class origins behind, or total annihilation. In The Melancholia of Class, Cynthia Cruz analyses how this choice between assimilation or annihilation has played out in the lives of working-class musicians, artists, writers, and filmmakers — including Amy Winehouse, Ian Curtis, Jason Molina, Barbara Loden, and many more — and the resultant Freudian melancholia that ensues when the working-class subject leaves their origins to “become someone,” only to find that they lose themselves in the process. Part memoir, part cultural theory, and part polemic, The Melancholia of Class shows us how we can resist assimilation, uplifting and carrying our working-class origins and communities with us, as we break the barriers of the middle-class world. There are so many of us, all of us waiting. If we came together, who knows what we could do.

The Melancholia of Class

The Melancholia of Class PDF Author: Cynthia Cruz
Publisher: Watkins Media Limited
ISBN: 1913462277
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 210

Get Book Here

Book Description
What does it mean to be working-class in a middle-class world? Cynthia Cruz shows us how class affects culture and our mental health and what we can do about it -- calling not for assimilation, but for annihilation. To be working-class in a middle-class world is to be a ghost. Excluded, marginalised, and subjected to violence, the working class is also deemed by those in power to not exist. We are left with a choice between assimilation into middle-class values and culture, leaving our working-class origins behind, or total annihilation. In The Melancholia of Class, Cynthia Cruz analyses how this choice between assimilation or annihilation has played out in the lives of working-class musicians, artists, writers, and filmmakers — including Amy Winehouse, Ian Curtis, Jason Molina, Barbara Loden, and many more — and the resultant Freudian melancholia that ensues when the working-class subject leaves their origins to “become someone,” only to find that they lose themselves in the process. Part memoir, part cultural theory, and part polemic, The Melancholia of Class shows us how we can resist assimilation, uplifting and carrying our working-class origins and communities with us, as we break the barriers of the middle-class world. There are so many of us, all of us waiting. If we came together, who knows what we could do.

Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation

Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation PDF Author: David L. Eng
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478002689
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
In Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation critic David L. Eng and psychotherapist Shinhee Han draw on case histories from the mid-1990s to the present to explore the social and psychic predicaments of Asian American young adults from Generation X to Generation Y. Combining critical race theory with several strands of psychoanalytic thought, they develop the concepts of racial melancholia and racial dissociation to investigate changing processes of loss associated with immigration, displacement, diaspora, and assimilation. These case studies of first- and second-generation Asian Americans deal with a range of difficulties, from depression, suicide, and the politics of coming out to broader issues of the model minority stereotype, transnational adoption, parachute children, colorblind discourses in the United States, and the rise of Asia under globalization. Throughout, Eng and Han link psychoanalysis to larger structural and historical phenomena, illuminating how the study of psychic processes of individuals can inform investigations of race, sexuality, and immigration while creating a more sustained conversation about the social lives of Asian Americans and Asians in the diaspora.

Clara Mondschein's Melancholia

Clara Mondschein's Melancholia PDF Author: Anne Raeff
Publisher: MP Publishing
ISBN: 1596928700
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
When I was younger, I wished I had been born in a concentration camp like my mother, instead of in boring Englewood Hospital. I used to imagine all the prisoners crying mutely with joy while my grandmother lay swallowing her screams so the guards wouldn’t hear. So writes Deborah Gelb, the teenage daughter of the title character, in her opening chapter. Deborah’s voice is complemented by that of Ruth Mondschein – Clara’s mother, who recounts her life story to Tommy, a patient at the AIDS hospice where she volunteers. In alternating chapters, Deborah and Mrs Mondschein depict the lives of three generations of women as both daughter and mother attempt to make sense of Clara’s 'melancholia' and the historical events that profoundly affected them all. While the novel is set in mid-1990s New York and suburban New Jersey, Deborah and Mrs Mondschein’s stories move through much of the twentieth century, from Vienna and Czechoslovakia, to Spain and Morocco. At the heart of this ambitious novel is the question of why some people are strengthened by adversity – even something as horrific as genocide – and others are defeated by it. Clara Mondschein’s Melancholia examines with bravado and sensitivity how the lingering effects of one of history’s darkest hours – including guilt, anger, loyalty and hope – live on in a single family.

An Arab Melancholia

An Arab Melancholia PDF Author: Abdellah Taïa
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 158435111X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 145

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Book Description
An autobiographical portrait of a gay Arab man, living between cultures, seeking an identity through love and writing. I had to rediscover who I was. And that's why I left the apartment.... And there I was, right in the heart of the Arab world, a world that never tired of making the same mistakes over and over.... I had no more leniency when it came to the Arab world... None for the Arabs and none for myself. I suddenly saw things with merciless lucidity.... —An Arab Melancholia Salé, near Rabat. The mid 1980s. A lower-class teenager is running until he's out of breath. He's running after his dream, his dream to become a movie director. He's running after the Egyptian movie star, Souad Hosni, who's out there somewhere, miles away from this neighborhood—which is a place the teenager both loves and hates, the home at which he is not at home, an environment that will only allow him his identity through the cultural lens of shame and silence. Running is the only way he can stand up to the violence that is his Morocco. Irresistibly charming, angry, and wry, this autobiographical novel traces the emergence of Abdellah Taïa's identity as an openly gay Arab man living between cultures. The book spans twenty years, moving from Salé, to Paris, to Cairo. Part incantation, part polemic, and part love letter, this extraordinary novel creates a new world where the self is effaced by desire and love, and writing is always an act of discovery.

Melancholia of Freedom

Melancholia of Freedom PDF Author: Thomas Blom Hansen
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400842611
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 373

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Book Description
The end of apartheid in 1994 signaled a moment of freedom and a promise of a nonracial future. With this promise came an injunction: define yourself as you truly are, as an individual, and as a community. Almost two decades later it is clear that it was less the prospect of that future than the habits and horizons of anxious life in racially defined enclaves that determined postapartheid freedom. In this book, Thomas Blom Hansen offers an in-depth analysis of the uncertainties, dreams, and anxieties that have accompanied postapartheid freedoms in Chatsworth, a formerly Indian township in Durban. Exploring five decades of township life, Hansen tells the stories of ordinary Indians whose lives were racialized and framed by the township, and how these residents domesticated and inhabited this urban space and its institutions, during apartheid and after. Hansen demonstrates the complex and ambivalent nature of ordinary township life. While the ideology of apartheid was widely rejected, its practical institutions, from urban planning to houses, schools, and religious spaces, were embraced in order to remake the community. Hansen describes how the racial segmentation of South African society still informs daily life, notions of race, personhood, morality, and religious ethics. He also demonstrates the force of global religious imaginings that promise a universal and inclusive community amid uncertain lives and futures in the postapartheid nation-state.

Left-Wing Melancholia

Left-Wing Melancholia PDF Author: Enzo Traverso
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231543018
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
The fall of the Berlin Wall marked the end of the Cold War but also the rise of a melancholic vision of history as a series of losses. For the political left, the cause lost was communism, and this trauma determined how leftists wrote the next chapter in their political struggle and how they have thought about their past since. Throughout the twentieth century, argues Left-Wing Melancholia, from classical Marxism to psychoanalysis to the advent of critical theory, a culture of defeat and its emotional overlay of melancholy have characterized the leftist understanding of the political in history and in theoretical critique. Drawing on a vast and diverse archive in theory, testimony, and image and on such thinkers as Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, and others, the intellectual historian Enzo Traverso explores the varying nature of left melancholy as it has manifested in a feeling of guilt for not sufficiently challenging authority, in a fear of surrendering in disarray and resignation, in mourning the human costs of the past, and in a sense of failure for not realizing utopian aspirations. Yet hidden within this melancholic tradition are the resources for a renewed challenge to prevailing regimes of historicity, a passion that has the power to reignite the dialectic of revolutionary thought.

Cultures of the Death Drive

Cultures of the Death Drive PDF Author: Esther Sánchez-Pardo
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822330455
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 510

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Book Description
DIVA study of melancholia, sexuality, and representation in literary and visual texts that can be read at the crossroads of psychoanalysis and the arts in modernism./div

Environmental Melancholia

Environmental Melancholia PDF Author: Renee Lertzman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131791693X
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
In this groundbreaking book, Renee Lertzman applies psychoanalytic theory and psychosocial research to the issue of public engagement and public apathy in response to chronic ecological threats. By highlighting unconscious and affective dimensions of contemporary ecological issues, Lertzman deconstructs the idea that there is a gap between what people care about and what is actually carried out in policy and personal practice. In doing so, she presents an innovative way to think about and design engagement practices and policy interventions. Based on key qualitative fieldwork and in-depth interviews conducted in Green Bay, Wisconsin, each chapter provides a psychosocial, psychoanalytic perspective on subjectivity, affect and identity, and considers what this means for understanding behaviour in relation to environmental crises and climate change. The book argues for a theory of environmental melancholia that accounts for the ways in which people experience profound loss and disruption caused by environmental issues, and yet may have trouble expressing or making sense of such experiences. Environmental Melancholia offers a fresh perspective to the field of environmental psychology that until now has been largely dominated by research in cognitive, behavioural and social psychology. It will appeal to academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of psychoanalysis, psychosocial studies and sustainability, as well as policy makers and educators internationally.

The Rise of the Right

The Rise of the Right PDF Author: Winlow, Simon
Publisher: Policy Press
ISBN: 1447328485
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
One of the biggest political stories of the past few decades in the United Kingdom and elsewhere has been the growing divide between the working class and the mainstream liberal left, which historically has spoken for them. This book offers a close analysis of that phenomenon by showing how the political scene looks to underemployed white men who have seen their standards of living fall in recent years even as their communities have fractured around them. Rather than cast aspersions or mount arguments about the larger success of society as a whole, The Rise of the Right takes these men and their concerns seriously, showing where their opinions are factually wrong but arguing powerfully that liberal politics must find a way of acknowledging and addressing their legitimate fears and frustrations.

Of Motherhood and Melancholia

Of Motherhood and Melancholia PDF Author: Lou-Marié Kruger
Publisher: University of Kwazulu Natal Press
ISBN: 9781869144340
Category : Dwars Valley (Western Cape, South Africa)
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
This book is about the slow violence of poverty. Lou-Marie Kruger's clinical and research encounters in the Dwarsrivier Valley attempt to give an account of the complex realities and lived experiences of low-income mothers in post-apartheid South Africa. Focusing specifically on maternal life in a semi-rural community, the work can be regarded as a South African case study, showing how particular happenings, specific events, unique interactions and larger societal processes become intertwined to result in complex narratives. Such intricate narratives do not only show how the past always impacts on the present, but can also implicitly suggest how and why such stories are prone to be repeated. While the book can be seen as a study of a place and a community, the lives of individual people and how they are embedded in the larger matrix of culture, history and the political economy are also present. The pertinent question here is one asked by medical anthropologist Paul Farmer: by which mechanisms precisely, do social forces ranging from poverty to racism to gender become embodied as individual experience?