A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia
By David L. Eng, Shinhee Han. Loss, 2000
243 citations recorded by the source corpus.
As Freud's privileged theory of unresolved grief, melancholia presents a compelling framework to conceptualize registers of loss and depression attendant to both psychic and material processes of Asian American immigration, assimilation, and racialization. Freud initially formulates melancholia as a pathological form of individual mourning for lost objects, places, or ideals. However, we propose a concept of melancholia as a depathologized structure of everyday group experience for Asian Americans. We analyze a number of Asian American cultural productions (literature and film) as well as two case histories of university students involving intergenerational conflicts and lost ideals of whiteness, Asianness, home, and language. Exploring these analyses against Klein's notions of lost objects, we propose a more refined theory of good and bad racialized objects. This theory raises the psychic and political difficulties of reinstatement and the mediation of the depressive position for Asian Americans. In addition, this theory suggests that processes of immigration, assimilation, and racialization are neither pathological nor permanent but involve the fluid negotiation between mourning and melancholia. Throughout this essay, we consider methods by which a more speculative approach to psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice might offer a deeper understanding of Asian American mental health issues.
Subfields: Gender Studies, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8a0c5a87c96c5048aea507519ade7e105914f6db
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In Gender Studies
In Sociology and Political Science
Citations in the corpus
- Who's Responsible? Our Mutual Implication in Each Other's Suffering (2009, background): “When something I read about minority attempts to inhabit a fictive whiteness (Eng & Han, 2002) made me finally realize that I had assumed that position in the treatment, I began to explore what whiteness meant to him and lo and behold, what it seemed to signify was a position of invulnerability,…”