Some Losses Remain with Us: Impossible Mourning and the Prevalence of Ritual in August Wilson's The Piano Lesson

Despite psychoanalytic criticism's universalizing, ahistorical, and imperialist inclinations, it nevertheless can prove indispensable for understanding The Piano Lesson's representation of post-emancipation African America's unclaimed cultural inheritance. This is the argument "Some Losses Remain with Us" makes as it puts psychoanalytic theorizations of Sigmund Freud's concept of melancholia and Jacques Derrida's post-structuralist reading of Karl Marx's work on specters in conversation with Wilson's play to uncover a paradigm for understanding a cultural melancholy. Wilson's play reveals how hidden affect is sustained as a result of and in resistance to an enduring struggle with racial oppression. In doing so, the play stages parallel trajectories of psychological restriction sustained by post-Emancipation black men and women through ritual practice as they struggle for inclusion in a segregationist society that has historically subjugated them.