This article explores loneliness as the affective life of settler colonialism through the work of queer Indigenous writer Billy-Ray Belcourt's two volumes of poetry This Wound Is a World and NDN Coping Mechanisms. In particular, the article focuses on how Belcourt draws on queer affect theory and critical race theory in the work of scholars such as Jose Muñoz, Leo Bersani, Lauren Berlant, Ann Cvetkovich, Saidiya Hartman and Christina Sharpe – as he explores the relation between sex and death, and (...) between cruising cultures and the ongoing genocide of Indigenous peoples. It argues that Belcourt's innovative fusion of poetry and theory provides new genres for racialised understandings of loneliness and other structures of feeling. (shrink)

What if depression, in the Americas at least, could be traced to histories of colonialism, genocide, slavery, exclusion, and everyday segregation and isolation that haunt all of our lives, rather than to biochemical imbalances? This article seeks alternatives to the medical model found in most depression memoirs by considering how the epistemological and methodological struggles faced by a scholar of the African diaspora confronted by the absent archive of slavery are relevant to discussions of political depression. Combining scholarly investigation and (...) personal memoir, Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother exemplifies feminism’s affective turn not only by bringing personal narrative into scholarship, but by seeking reparation for the past in the affective dynamics of cultural memory rather than in legal reform or state recognition. Stubbornly refusing to find solace in an African past before slavery, though, Hartman provides a model of emotional reparation in which feelings of loss and alienation persist. Her work suggests the relevance of political depression to both the ordinary life of racism and to what gets called clinical depression. (shrink)