In Search of Return

Shifa Haq traces the dynamics of mourning, collective trauma, and political resistance in personal accounts of mourners of the disappeared persons, providing insights into psyche-polis connection. By using a psychoanalytic lens, this book turns to individual cases to throw light on claims of affect and memory to re-imagine social suffering.

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Shifa Haq examines mourning marked by the travail of waiting in the context of disappearances. Beginning in 1989, more than 8,000 men disappeared in Kashmir, leaving a gaping void in personal and cultural imagination on how to mourn a loss denied widely. Drawn from ten years of engagement— through interviews, observation and witnessing—with the mourners of the disappeared persons in Kashmir, In Search of Return reflects on intricate experiences of mourning as they attempt to elaborate the meaning of disappearance, militarization and ethics of mourning. Beyond psychoanalytic understanding of success and failure to mourn, Haq argues for a new consideration on mourning to include porous, affective links with the political as ethical aim of mourning.