Writing from the Wound: Racial Melancholia and the Entangled Affects of Feminist Ethnography

This article is about the necessity of working with and through the concept of racial melancholia in ethnographic work as a racialized insider researcher. I rework this concept in light of my fieldwork in Kurdistan, Turkey, and Denmark, by examining the affective dimensions of feminist ethnographic fieldwork, and through the suggestion that we ought to think of such a method of knowledge-production as always already situated in and engaged with an “affective landscape.” The article argues that attending to the affect of racial melancholia in ethnographic practice opens up new ethical and theoretical possibilities for negotiating the costs for the researcher’s sense of self and embodied racialization, as it does for reconsidering the nature and effect of ethnographic research with racially minoritized and oppressed communities. By rearticulating racial melancholia as an ethnographically meaningful conceptual operator, the article offers a critical, analytical, methodological, and ethical framework to deepen the post/decolonial feminist theorization of the complex nature of the epistemic “standpoints.”