Belonging, Loss, and Forced Joy
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“Unhappiness is read as caused not simply by diversity but by the failure of people who embody such diversity to ‘touch and interact.’” This unhappiness would, as Trevor Philips may argue, lead to unhappy instances of violence. Philips recommends that communities integrate by sharing “an activity” such as football to connect people by taking them out of their ethnicities. “Multiculturalism might become happy when it involves loyalty to what has already been established as a national idea. Happiness is thus promised in return for loyalty to the nation, where loyalty is defined in terms of playing its game.”
British utilitarianism philosophy was also meddled in matters of empire. It so became that causing the greatest happiness meant bringing a colonizing, happy-making mission to the colonized peoples. This helped argue for a philanthropist-like perspective on colonialism. “Empire becomes a gift that cannot be refused, a forced gift. If the empire is understood as giving happiness, then perhaps happiness names the force of this gift.”
Mills’ characterizations of the colonized as childlike primitives is an assessment of their emotional state as he argues that the colonized allow emotion, as well as their senses to dictate their knowledge in contrast to “the impartial witness—the civilized man—[who] stands back and looks for the true causes of action in the world.”
“For Mill, the natives are mistaken, swayed by their inclinations immersed in the object that gives pleasure : like children, they are assumed to be in need of redirection.”
The colonial project is imagined as a form of “moral training or habituation” where the natives are like children, they are impressionable, and their education is to be arranged in a way that “happiness is the result.” Empire itself is argued to be a sign of British tendency toward happy diversity; toward mixing, loving, and cohabiting with others. The history of empire leads to migrants’ judgment for citizenship. Just as the colonized were pushed to become British, it is now migrants that have to commit this act which shapes policy. “To become British is to accept empire as the gift of happiness.”
For the migrant, to become a part of this empire, it is process of grief and of course melancholia. Early Freid distringuished mourning and melancholia by arguing that mourning is a relatively healthy process for grieving for a lost object, with the aim of this grief to let go of the object. However, “the melancholic may appear as a figure insofar as we recognize the melancholic as the one who ‘holds onto’ an object that has been lost, who does not let go, or get over loss by getting over it.
To diagnose melancholia would become a way of declaring that their love objects are dead. The melancholic is attached to something that is already dead because the melancholic cannot by making a self-declaration that the object is dead the same way another would pronounce that object to be dead.
In a commiunity, while everyone has already let go of the things they are supposed to let go of, the melancholic is still unable to get over loss and so becomes te affect alien. “The melancholic are thus the ones who must be redirected, or turned around.” So in the larger community, say in the UK, everyone else has accepted and knows the migrant’s past is dead except for the migrant. The migrant is expected to celebrate the multicultural, diverse British society and must rejoice in being a citizen, but the migrant is the affect alien and is the diagnosed melancholic.
Sawhney’s song shines a light on this melancholic feeling, specifically as it relates to second generation immigrants. This song might be in the voice of the second generation immigrant who does not quite understand what was behind the first generation’s migration, and will never tangibly feel it. As it relates to melancholia, the second generation immigrant does not even know what it is that it mourns. It does not know what the past was, what the country of origin was, or what the memories would have been. Therefore, there is not an object that has been declared dead for the person to then mourn it—the object never really existed in the first place. So how can the migrant possibly let go of something that was never there to begin with.