Tate, S. A. (2007). "Translating melancholia: a poetics of black interstitial community." Community, Work & Family 10(1): 1-15.
This article argues that the process of translating melancholia ('an affective state caused by the inability to assimilate a loss, and the consequent nagging return of the thing lost in psychic life', Khanna, 2003, cited p. 4) within people's talk about their life stories on identity, belonging and community makes 'the Black community' as a fixed point of reference impossible because translating melancholia leads to critical agency which reconstructs the boundaries of community. In other words, translating melancholia is performative, as 'the Black community' takes shape through talk. The research methods are based on a discourse analysis of talk about life stories to show that there is an ideal in the form of a dominant discourse on 'the Black community' which is constantly disturbed and re-made by melancholic translations at the level of the everyday. The article concludes that there are boundaries of affect rather than physical boundaries when talking about 'the Black community', and that these boundaries are circumscribed by a politics of race.