Critical Times 6:2

How does one narrate a loss after the destruction of its context, when the border between mourning and melancholia is rendered unstable, or in the absence of a common historical horizon? This special issue maps out asymmetric distributions of loss across varied disciplines and archives in order to grapple with these difficult questions. Contributions traverse mourning and racial melancholia as they inhabit and exceed the geography of Afghanistan; Bataille’s concept of sovereignty as it figures a “survivor” born of catastrophe; parallax loss in the People’s Republic of China; a new theorization of “danger”; the Quechua Bolivian remaking of landscapes defined by subjection; Canadian Indigenous loss and settler mania; a rethinking of fetishistic narratives of the Iranian revolution; a wayward approach to black theology for Black thought; a historical situation of loss in Thailand’s far south; the losses wrought by Chilean neoliberalism; and finally, an analysis of Madhulika Jalali’s documentary film, Ghar ka Pata, a Kashmiri Pandit memory project. With a special section titled “Erosion,” the issue explores global permutations of loss while remaining attentive to the history of destruction.