Gautam Basu Thakur, professor in the Department of English, delivered the keynote address at the symposium “Jouissance, Race, Decoloniality” organized by the Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture, State University of New York at Buffalo. Basu Thakur’s presentation, “The Triumph of Despair: Jouissance, Racial Melancholia, and (death as) Liberation in Claire de Duras’s Ourika (1823),” discussed the psychoanalytic concept of the death-drive through a close reading of the 1823 French novella Ourika.