The Melancholy of Kinship in Post-Reform China and Postcolonial Literature

The Melancholy of Kinship in Post-reform China and Postcolonial Literature, brings post-reform Chinese cultural texts into conversation with postcolonial novels from Africa and Asia to examine the shared experiences of kinship loss as a response to historical trauma, state violence, and socioeconomic dispossession. Looking beyond Eurocentric paradigms of kinship shaped by Western liberalism, structural anthropology, and Freudian-informed psychoanalysis, this book argues that literary and cultural spheres of the Global South are reclaiming kinship as a form of political sociality rooted in decolonial traditions, precisely through mourning its loss. Ultimately, it draws attention to the ways that narratives from the Global South open up new possibilities for emancipation in a postsocialist and postcolonial world marked by enduring and emerging forms of unfreedom.

Yawen Li is a Lecturer in Comparative Literature at King’s College London.

1. Introduction.- 2. Work on and of Mourning: Spectral Connections and Futures Pasts in Sweet and Sour Milk and Brothers.- 3. Minor Transnationalism and its Reverse: Reterritorialising Collective Memory, Identity, and Belonging in Homegoing and Found.- 4. Autoethnographic Approaches and the Ethics of Cosmopolitan Witnessing in The God of Small Things and All About My Sisters.- 5. Conclusion: Tenacious Bonds and the Comparatist’s Responsibility in the Age of New Colonialism.