Mourning and African American Ritual

African American mourning and ritual are cultural by-products of enduring racism in a nation premised on equality of opportunity. Coming to terms with social losses wrought by prolonged dreams deferred or using ritual to channel the hidden affect that results from the inability to do so is the definitive tension of Black life. African American being and becoming is the ongoing process of navigating persistent state-sanctioned violence. The term impossible mourning refers to the trans-historical complex of social and emotional injunctions that travel across time and social space at the intersections of racism and racial formations. As such, impossible mourning is an inextricable component of racialized subjectivity. This tethering of impossible mourning and Black subjectivity is reinforced by the historical pairings of freedom and enslavement, conformity and exclusion, privilege and indifference, and due process and lawful execution in the United States. This tension provides an analytic for understanding and navigating African American being and becoming. W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folks (1903) is one of the first interdisciplinary explorations of Black being and becoming. Using the tension of unrequited mourning and ritual as a lens for exploring the African American human and social condition, Du Bois’s seminal collection of essays galvanized the field of African American literary and cultural studies in ways that continue to shape its development. As such, African American lives and communities have historically measured and interrogated the moral quotient of US society, tracing its jagged arch of racial progress. From advertisements of Rufus Jones for President (1933) featuring Ethel Waters to Diana Ross’s portrayal of Billie Holiday in Sidney Furie’s Lady Sings the Blues (1972), the cultural production and circulation of representations of impossible mourning have responded to and collided against this jagged arch of racial progress in ways that render racial melancholia studies a relevant and growing topic of investigation. While the notion of impossible mourning uncovers a paradigm for understanding how unresolved racial grievances give shape to Black life, Jermaine Singleton’s Cultural Melancholy: Reading of Race, Impossible Mourning, and African American Ritual (2015) provides a grammar for reading the ways rituals of racial resistance transfer and transform hidden affect discreetly across time and social space, consolidating and connecting racial identities and communities along the way. As such, the vexed intersections of African American mourning and ritual afford individualistic and interpersonal readings of Black subjectivity that do not force “the one” to stand in for “the many.” Moreover, impossible mourning and ritual provide a context for seeing how “the racialized one” is haunted by the psychic and historical resonances that circumscribe “the racial many,” present and past. African American mourning is a proxy for an impossible mourning that connects discrete social, historical, and cultural contexts. The investigation of this psycho-social intercourse, particularly as it intersects with ritual and performance, is an interdisciplinary enterprise that weds psychoanalysis, literary and cultural studies, performance studies, and African American studies. What is more, literary and cultural representations and critiques of this impossible mourning, as Ralph Ellison implies in “The Art of Fiction: An Interview” (1955), take on the form and function of aesthetic ritual. While this article focuses on mourning, its impossibility, and African American ritual as aesthetic, cultural, and critical traditions, it also provides a framework for understanding them as characteristically transnational, transhistorical, multimodal, and mutually reinforcing.