Re/Imagining Depression

What is depression? An "imagined sun, bright and black at the same time?" A "noonday demon?" In literature, poetry, comics, visual art, and film, we witness new conceptualizations of depression come into being. Unburdened by diagnostic criteria and pharmaceutical politics, these media employ imagery, narrative, symbolism, and metaphor to forge imaginative, exploratory, and innovative representations of a range of experiences that might get called "depression." Texts such as Julia Kristeva's Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (1989), Andrew Solomon's The Noonday Demon (2000), Allie Brosh's cartoons, "Adventures in Depression" (2011) and "Depression Part Two" (2013), and Lars von Trier's film Melancholia (2011) each offer portraits of depression that deviate from, or altogether reject, the dominant language of depression that has been articulated by and within psychiatry. Most recently, Ann Cvetkovich's Depression: A Public Feeling (2012) has answered the author's own call for a multiplication of discourses on depression by positing crafting as one possible method of working through depression-as-"impasse." Inspired by Cvetkovich's efforts to re-shape the depressive experience itself and the critical ways in which we communicate this experience to others, Re/Imagining Depression: Creative Approaches to "Feeling Bad" harnesses critical theory, gender studies, critical race theory, affect theory, visual art, performance, film, television, poetry, literature, comics, and other media to generate new paradigms for thinking about the depressive experience. Through a combination of academic essays, prose, poetry, and interviews, this anthology aims to destabilize the idea of the mental health "expert" to instead demonstrate the diversity of affects, embodiments, rituals and behaviors that are often collapsed under the singular rubric of "depression." Julie Hollenbach (NSCAD University) is a material culture scholar, independent curator, and arts writer whose work addresses contemporary and historic queer and feminine everyday domestic creative cultures using a queer femininist, critical race, and decolonial methodology.

Robin Alex McDonald (Nipissing University / OCAD University) is an academic, independent curator, and arts writer whose research spans queer and trans contemporary art, art and social justice, museum studies and alternative curatorial methodologies, affect theory; madness and disability studies, and theories of love, collectivity, and "the social."

Auteur

Julie Hollenbach (NSCAD University, Canada) is a material culture scholar, independent curator, and arts writer whose work addresses contemporary and historic queer and feminine everyday domestic creative cultures using a queer femininist, critical race, and decolonial methodology.

Robin Alex McDonald (Nipissing University / OCAD University, Canada) is an academic, independent curator, and arts writer whose research spans queer and trans contemporary art, art and social justice, museum studies and alternative curatorial methodologies, affect theory; madness and disability studies, and theories of love, collectivity, and the social.

Texte du rabat
What is depression? An imagined sun, bright and black at the same time? A noonday demon? In literature, poetry, comics, visual art, and film, we witness new conceptualizations of depression come into being. Unburdened by diagnostic criteria and pharmaceutical politics, these media employ imagery, narrative, symbolism, and metaphor to forge imaginative, exploratory, and innovative representations of a range of experiences that might get called depression. Texts such as Julia Kristeva's Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (1989), Andrew Solomon's The Noonday Demon (2000), Allie Brosh's cartoons, Adventures in Depression (2011) and Depression Part Two (2013), and Lars von Trier's film Melancholia (2011) each offer portraits of depression that deviate from, or altogether reject, the dominant language of depression that has been articulated by and within psychiatry. Most recently, Ann Cvetkovich's Depression: A Public Feeling (2012) has answered the author's own call for a multiplication of discourses on depression by positing crafting as one possible method of working through depression-as-impasse.
Inspired by Cvetkovich's efforts to re-shape the depressive experience itself and the critical ways in which we communicate this experience to others, Re/Imagining Depression: Creative Approaches to Feeling Bad harnesses critical theory, gender studies, critical race theory, affect theory, visual art, performance, film, television, poetry, literature, comics, and other media to generate new paradigms for thinking about the depressive experience. Through a combination of academic essays, prose, poetry, and interviews, this anthology aims to destabilize the idea of the mental health expert to instead demonstrate the diversity of affects, embodiments, rituals and behaviors that are often collapsed under the singular rubric of depression.
Julie Hollenbach (NSCAD University) is a material culture scholar, independent curator, and arts writer whose work addresses contemporary and historic queer and feminine everyday domestic creative cultures using a queer femininist, critical race, and decolonial methodology.

Robin Alex McDonald (Nipissing University / OCAD University) is an academic, independent curator, and arts writer whose research spans queer and trans contemporary art, art and social justice, museum studies and alternative curatorial methodologies, affect theory; madness and disability studies, and theories of love, collectivity, and the social.

Contenu

1 Re/Imagining Depression.- 2 The Alphabet of Feeling Bad Now.- 3 Feeling Brown, Feeling Down: Latina Affect, The Performativity of Race, and the Depressive Position.- 4 Not Down but Different: Depression in the Shadow of the Black Dog.- 5 Blue Histories: Thinking With Sadness in the Middle Ages.- 6 Teaching/Depression as a Queer Theory for Living.- 7 Titled Things: Materiality and Reification in Antidepressant Narratives.- 8 Variations on Depression in the Work of Ken Lum.- 9 Don't We Hurt Like You? Examining the Lack of Portrayals of African American Women and Mental Health.- 10 Feeling Unproductive: Vivek Shraya on the creative labor of negative affect.- 11 I want to be a seashell, I want to be a mold, I want to be a spirit.- 12 Being Sita: Gayathri Ramprasad's Shadows in the Sun.- 13 Toward the Ekstasis of Rilke's Angels: The Value of Depression in Gwyneth Lewis's Poetry and Memoir.- 14 Bird Says the Sound of Rewind.- 15 The present is what we are doing together.