Unmuting the subject of partition: rhythms of depression and the ongoing crisis of the modern European subject

Kolar Aparna & Manju Sharma

In this paper we wish to engage with the entanglements between geopolitical moments such as the partition of India/Pakistan, ‘asylum crisis’ (since 2015), and more recently COVID-19 in EU and rhythms of arriving in a very broad sense (mostly as a mental condition) in terms of the ongoing unfinished process of becoming a modern European subject and citizen. This entanglement of mental health and geopolitical events is often muted in dominant narratives of crisis. We unmute the above geopolitical moments through biographical stories of depression, and conditions of muteness, silence, mimicry and schizophrenia they produce. Such conditions we argue need to be understood as shaping the ongoing crisis of the lived condition of “never leaving never arriving to Europe”. We perform stories in tandem and emit drawings to situate such knowledges in the tensed fields of opacity and healing.

Key words: depression, never arriving, sisterhood, Europeanness, partition 

Abstract for a chapter in a book, title Silencing Crises / Making Crises Speak, The production of resilient bodies in times of crisis,University Copenhagen, book proposal from EASA, editors are Dorte Jagetic Andersen & Lola Aubry, to be published by University of Copenhagen internal press in late 2023.