Toward Feeling Fragments: Melancholic Migrants and Other Affect Aliens in the Philippian and Corinthian Assemblies

Abstract

Grief and trauma mark both the ancient past and the present, while melancholia reflects the possibilities for holding on in both contexts. In order to vary and multiply our approaches to people and places touched by loss, biblical scholars could get a different feel for the potentials of melancholia as examined in affect, queer, and critical race theories. While Pauline letters often aim to convert grief away from pain and trauma, the pre-Pauline materials within them (specifically, the slogans in 1 Corinthians and the Christ-hymn in Philippians) index a communal melancholia, refusals to “get over it” or relinquish the other and/as lost object(s). Though the other affect aliens in the assembly communities are moving within colonized contexts shaped by layered sediments of insidious trauma, their slogans and hymns assemble contingent and temporary fragments, modes of negotiating difficult conditions, of loss and death, enslavement and exploitation, unwanted touch and ongoing suffering – without forgetting.