Melancholic Cosmopolitanism: On Alternative Temporalities as Decolonization

As Fredric Jameson explicates in his dissection of Walter Benjamin, allegory is the way in which the melancholic extricate themselves from the confinement of the time of history that is “mere succession without development (Jameson 1969, 59)”. This temporality, according to scholars like Pheng Cheah (2016), may be understood as a colonial experience of time that is mechanic and causal and has been imposed upon third-world subjects whose original temporalities have been replaced. Thus, a form of nostalgic melancholy emerges due to the discrepancy between the local temporalities and the colonial temporality. This panel envisages the possibility of a cosmopolitan solidarity constructed upon the shared experience of melancholy and practiced by the global melancholic whose work challenges the colonial imposition of the mechanic temporality. Instead of understanding nostalgic melancholy as an involuntary and negative structure of feeling as Svetlana Boym has argued, I seek to define melancholy as a reaction to colonial modernity through which the local temporalities can be rediscovered and retrieved. Therefore, this panel invites scholars across different disciplines to think about how writers, artists, directors, and practitioners utilize melancholy and nostalgia to speak against the colonial narration of history and for their own possibilities of historiography. For example, how have Filipino artist Kidlat Tahimik’s films and other works of art preserve the memory of his pre-colonial indigenous ancestors? How has Sony Liew’s The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye make visible a historical account of the birth of Malaysia and Singapore from a local perspective? More importantly, I seek to ask how these different allegories are connected with each other in a way that they create a world that exists in the form of alter-temporalities.