Asian American Studies Now: A Critical Reader

4 A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia

4 A DIALOGUE ON RACIAL MELANCHOLIA David L. Eng and Shinhee Han I wondered if whiteness were contagious. If it were, then surely I had caught it. I imagined this “condition” affected the way I walked, talked, dressed, danced, and at its most advanced stage, the way I looked at the world and at other people. —DANZY SENNA, CAUCASIA THE “CONDITION” OF WHITENESS Configuring whiteness as contagion, Birdie Lee, the narrator of Danzy Senna’s Caucasia, connects assimilation to illness and disease. Separated from her African American activist father, Birdie Lee and her blue-blooded mother flee from the law in a racialized and radicalized 1970s Boston. Eventually, the two take up residence in New Hampshire, where Birdie passes as “Jesse” and for white.1 This assimilation into the whiteness of New Hampshire plagues Birdie, who wonders if she “had actually become Jesse, and it was this girl, this Birdie Lee who haunted these streets, searching for ghosts, who was the lie.” This vexing “condition” of whiteness not only alters the narrator’s physical world—the manner in which Birdie walks, talks, dresses, and dances. It also configures the sphere of the affective—the ways in which Birdie ultimately apprehends the world and its occupants around her. Physically and psychically haunted, Birdie/Jesse feels “contaminated.”2 This is the condition of racial melancholia. IN PLACE OF A DIALOGUE This essay is the result of a series of sustained dialogues on racial melancholia that we recorded in the autumn and winter of 1998. We—a Chinese American male professor in the humanities and a Korean American female psychotherapist— transcribed, rewrote, and edited these dialogues into their present form. However, we hope that our distinct disciplinary approaches to psychoanalysis—from literary 56 D A V I D L . E N G A N D S H I N H E E H A N theory as well as from clinical practice—not only remain clear in this essay but also work to supplement each another. The pressing need to consider carefully methods by which a more speculative approach to psychoanalysis might enhance clinical applications, and vice versa, is urgent. This essay, in part, is a critical response to the disturbing patterns of depression that we have been witnessing in a significant and growing number of Asian American students with whom we interact on a regular basis. “A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia” provides , then, an opportunity for us to propose several ways of addressing race in psychoanalysis, a topic largely neglected in this field. 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 assimilation.3 Although Freud typically casts melancholia as pathological, we are more concerned with exploring this psychic condition as a depathologized structure of feeling. From this particular vantage , melancholia might be thought of as underpinning our everyday conflicts and struggles with experiences of immigration, assimilation, and racialization.4 Furthermore, even though melancholia is often conceived of in terms of individual loss and suffering, we are interested in addressing group identifications. As such, some of our observations bring together different minority groups—people of color as well as gays and lesbians—from widely disparate historical, juridical, cultural, social, and economic backgrounds. We are wary of generalizing, but we also hope that, in forging theoretical links among these various minority groups, we might develop new intellectual, clinical, and political coalitions. This essay is framed by two larger questions: How might psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice be leveraged to think about not only sexual but also racial identifications? How might we focus on these crossings in psychoanalysis to discuss, in particular, processes of immigration, assimilation, and racialization underpinning the formation of Asian American subjectivity? ASSIMILATION AS/AND MELANCHOLIA Freud’s theory of melancholia provides a provocative model to consider how processes of assimilation work in this country and how the depression that characterizes so much of our contemporary culture at the turn of this century might be thought about in relation to particularly marked social groups. In the United States today, assimilation into mainstream culture for people of color still means adopting a set of dominant norms and ideals—whiteness, heterosexuality, middle-class family values—often foreclosed to them. The loss of these norms— the reiterated loss of whiteness as an ideal, for example—establishes one melancholic framework for delineating assimilation and racialization processes in the United States precisely as a series of failed...