Ecomelancholia in the city: affects and memory in late industrial urban India

People increasingly inhabit toxic and damaged urban environments that change not only their bodies but also their affective relations with the city. This paper focuses on 'urban ecomelancholia,' an affective response to experienced or anticipated environmental damage and loss, and the corresponding attachment to memories of past urban environments. As grieving with transformative potential, melancholia provides a lens to late industrialism's ambiguities of harm and hope. Focusing on middle-class urban dwellers in India, this paper asks how they experience and affectively relate to urban environmental change, harm, and loss. Situating urban ecomelancholia within scholarly debates on melancholia, this paper first examines urban dwellers' sensorial experiences of heat and its changes. Next, it traces residents' grief-tinged memories of one city's lost and polluted lakes and some of their attempts at ecological repair. Reflecting on melancholia's potential for activist work, these accounts are juxtaposed with a discussion of a visual artist's melancholic depictions of a polluted river and a Carnatic singer's music video in the midst of ecological ruins.