The Melancholy of Race Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief

by Cheng, Anne Anlin

• ISBN13: 9780195151626
• ISBN10: 0195151623
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2001-12-20
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

In this groundbreaking, interdisciplinary study Anne Anlin Cheng argues that we have to understand racial grief not only as the result of racism but also as a foundation for racial identity. The Melancholy of Race proposes that racial identification is itself already a melancholic act--asocial category that is imaginatively supported through a dynamic of loss and compensation, by which the racial other is at once rejected and retained. Using psychoanalytic theories on mourning and melancholia as inroads into her subject, Cheng offers a closely observed and carefully reasonedaccount of the minority experience as expressed in works of art by, and about, Asian-Americans and African-Americans. She argues that the racial minority and dominant American culture both suffer from racial melancholia and that this insight is crucial to a productive reimagining of progressivepolitics. Her discussion ranges from "Flower Drum Song" to "M. Butterfly," Brown v. Board of Education to Anna Deavere Smith's "Twilight," and Invisible Man to The Woman Warrior, in the process demonstrating that racial melancholia permeates our fantasies of citizenship, assimilation, and socialhealth. Her investigations reveal the common interests that social, legal, and literary histories of race have always shared with psychoanalysis, and situates Asian-American and African-American identities in relation to one another within the larger process of American racialization. A provocativelook at a timely subject, this study is essential reading for anyone interested in race studies, critical theory, or psychoanalysis.

Author Biography

Anne Anlin Cheng is Associate Professor of English and American Literature at the University of California, Berkeley.

Table of Contents

The Melancholy of Race	3	(28)
Beauty and Ideal Citizenship: Inventing Asian America in Rodgers and Hammerstein's Flower Drum Song (1961)	31	(34)
A Fable of Exquisite Corposes: Maxine Hong Kingston, Assimilation, and the Hypochondriacal Response	65	(38)
Fantasy's Repulsion and Investment: David Henry Hwang and Ralph Ellison	103	(36)
History in/against the Fragment: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha	139	(30)
Difficult Loves: Anna Deavere Smith and the Politics of Grief	169	(28)
Notes	197	(36)
Works Cited	233	(18)
Acknowledgments	251	(2)
Index	253