Post-Palliative: Coloniality's Affective Dissonance

Abstract

This article is an exploration of the concept of melancholia in psychoanalytic terms. Melancholia is proposed as an affect rather than
an affectation, and it is suggested that the whole field of postcolonial
studies has been melancholic, rather than celebratory, since its
inception. Melancholia is theorized through Freud and other
psychoanalytic theorists, and then related to the temporality of what
Adorno called "late style." The author discusses Edward Said's use of
the terms late style and lost cause, and then elaborates an idea of
postcolonial, or "late," sovereignty as a melancholic formation.