Depression

A Public Feeling

Autor: Cvetkovich, Ann
Editor: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822352235
eISBN Pdf: 9780822391852
Lloc de publicació: Durham , United States
Any de publicació digital: 2012
Mes: Novembre
Pàgines: 296
DDC: 616.85/27
Idioma: Anglés

Descripció

In Depression: A Public Feeling, Ann Cvetkovich combines memoir and critical essay in search of ways of writing about depression as a cultural and political phenomenon that offer alternatives to medical models. She describes her own experience of the professional pressures, creative anxiety, and political hopelessness that led to intellectual blockage while she was finishing her dissertation and writing her first book. Building on the insights of the memoir, in the critical essay she considers the idea that feeling bad constitutes the lived experience of neoliberal capitalism.

Cvetkovich draws on an unusual archive, including accounts of early Christian acedia and spiritual despair, texts connecting the histories of slavery and colonialism with their violent present-day legacies, and utopian spaces created from lesbian feminist practices of crafting. She herself seeks to craft a queer cultural analysis that accounts for depression as a historical category, a felt experience, and a point of entry into discussions about theory, contemporary culture, and everyday life. Depression: A Public Feeling suggests that utopian visions can reside in daily habits and practices, such as writing and yoga, and it highlights the centrality of somatic and felt experience to political activism and social transformation.

Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I. The Depression Journals (A Memoir)
- Going Down
- Swimming
- The Return
- Reflections: Memoir as Public Feelings Research Method
Part II. A Public Feelings Project (A Speculative Essay)
- 1. Writing Depression: Acedia, History, and Medical Models
- 2. From Dispossession to Radical Self-Possession: Racism and Depression
- 3. The Utopia of Ordinary Habit: Crafting, Creativity, and Spiritual Practice
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Illustration Credits
Index