#david eng

[volimetangere]

David Eng and Shinhee Han, Racial Melancholia and Racial Dissociation

Introduction

In the first half of the book, Eng and Han depathologize Freud's conception of melancholia, reading it as not a product of individual pathology but an experience that structures the lives of many Asian American immigrants and their descendants. Eng and Han see Asian Americans psychically moving between melancholia and mourning. Melancholia becomes the "conceptual key" to understand the unstated losses within "processes of immigration, assimilation, and racialization for Asian immigrants and their second-generation children" (25). While mourning is the process of libido, psychic energy, being withdrawn from the lost object, place or ideal, the melancholic subject cannot finish the process of mourning. They cannot withdraw psychic energy from their attachments to lost objects and reinvest in new objects. Asian Americans are particularly enmeshed within melancholia because of the "long history of immigration exclusion and bars to naturalization and citizenship" (25). Melancholia is not pathological but a "normative psychic state" (25) that Asian Americans live within in our colorblind age, as they live within losses (language, culture, community, homeland) that cannot be recuperated. In the second half of the book, Eng and Han look at the process of racial disassociation, where race functions as the political unconscious of our colorblind age. Race "appears as disappearing" (28) - the consensus of our multicultural age is that race is no longer an issue because there's no prohibition towards miscegenation and no legal discrimination, but Asian Americans have become self-policing in their effort to assimilate economically and culturally into white middle-class culture. People are disconnected from the ways race informs Asian Americans' difficulties in assimilating into the public sphere. Generations incur psychic damage from their distance and proximity to whiteness, established through both a history of legalized discrimination and the model minority stereotype.

Chapter 1 - Racial Melancholia: Model Minorities, Depression, and Suicide

While Freud typically casts melancholia as pathological, Eng and Han depathologize it as a "structure of feeling," a term they borrow from Raymond Williams to refer to emergent patterns of emotion still struggling for social form and recognition. Asian Americans are excluded from US norms and ideals, which include whiteness, heteronormativity, middle-class family values, and Judeo-Christian religious traditions. Exclusion from these norms due to their cultural difference leads to an experience of melancholia - Asian Americans cannot invest in these ideals. The melting pot picture of the US, where immigrants can blend into the dominant culture, is more successful with dominant Western European ethnic groups, as their differences are legally, socially, and psychically forged into an ideal of whiteness (36). Asians become split subjects, torn between the pre-WWII era of exclusion and the postwar era of inclusion, where they could become citizens within the emergence of the model minority stereotype. Within the stereotype of the American dream, Asians can only move towards economic achievements rather than sociocultural belonging. The hyperfocus on economic achievement creates a "dead subject," a subject unable to access their desires because of the demand to prioritize necessity over extravagance (46). The concept of sacrifice is key with intergenerational relationships - could sacrifice be a compensatory gesture that attaches itself to the losses, disappointments, and failures associated with immigration? Sacrifice is built on the idea that the new generation incurs a debt that can never be paid; in turn, the children of immigrants become self-sacrificing, perpetuating further losses that can never be repaid.

By calling Asian American mental health issues an issue of cultural difference, we're covering over structural questions of institutional violence and inequality. For example, Nelson is shamed by his teachers and students for not knowing (learning from his parents) how to pronounce certain English words. Consequently, he loses both his mother tongue and his mother as safe objects; he can't mirror his mother in Japanese or English as they're both transformed into objects of shame and insecurity. Eng and Han write poignantly that "an accent is the refusal to give up the mother or the mother tongue" (62). There's a certain ethical relation in melancholia - we preserve the threatened racial object rather than killing it off, reconstructing our identity through a multitude of losses that define us.

Chapter 2 - Desegregating Love: Transnational Adoption, Racial Reparation, and Racial Transitional Objects

The transnational adoptee disrupts the aesthetic continuity of the white nuclear family. While transnational adoptees often identify with their parents' whiteness, their parents do not identify with their children's Asianness. This failure of recognition severs the adoptee from the intimacy of the family - she's emotionally segregating and has to negotiate her own losses that are not mirrored by her family. Han speaks about one Korean adoptee, Mina, who demonstrated a Kleinian paranoid-schizoid split with her adoptive mother and her imagined Korean mother. She would idealize whiteness while denigrating her Korean mother who she imagined was wholly bad, abandoning her at birth. Mina's denigrating of her birth mother would cause her to express a dislike for Koreans, speaking about international students she knows in negative stereotypes. However, through working with a Korean American therapist, Mina is able to loosen her experience of her white adoptive mother as wholly good and her Korean birth mother as wholly bad. As a transitional object, her therapist provides a third space within which Mina can play with seemingly mutually exclusive choices. Mina opens up a network of formerly static racist associations and stereotypes, experiencing her own Koreanness with more complexity. This flexibility leads towards a "good enough" exploration of race, where similarity does not collapse into sameness and difference does not automatically translate into opposition (93).

Chapter 3 - Racial Disassociation: Parachute Children and Psychic Nowhere

There's a connection between the parachute children that are sent abroad to gain cultural capital from attending US schools and the longer history of Asian transnational labor practices, where men and women who migrate abroad in search of economic possibilities while leaving their children behind. The number of Asian youth who are sent abroad suggests that the East is a "problem" while the West is a "solution." This diasporic movement shows how American exceptionalism has been reinvented to become the fantasy of the US as an accommodating land of equal opportunity. Disassociation becomes a condition for many of these parachute children (and Asian Americans in general) as they can only access a false self - an affective state in which creativity and play become diminished. They apprehend reality through the other's eyes, where they are docile and conform to the demands of the mother and/or US sociocultural norms. The true self, in contrast, is the self that is capable to play and experience unity within fragments. Bromberg argues that psychic stability is marked by adaptive dissociation, the ability to feel like one self while standing in the spaces of many selves. In defensive dissociation, the subject cannot play and move through variations of different positions. Their desire to protect themselves through conforming to external expectations overwhelms any possibility of authentic self articulation. Racial stereotypes are exceptional pernicious in their creation of false selves, including the model minority stereotype, where people's images of themselves and society's stereotypes cannot be reconciled. In a "good-enough" picture of race relations, we would not fix the self and other in static positions. Rather than creating a binary of absolute victims and perpetrators, there would be a space of play in which difference might be in creative tension, allowing for individual agency and responsibility.

Chapter 4 - (Gay) Panic Attack: Coming Out in a Colorblind Age

Eng and Han present us with Christopher, who becomes the neoliberal version of the model minority stereotype under globalization. He self-imposes the stereotype, sacrificing everything for school and work and repressing his sexuality due to its nonproductive nature. Rather than passing as a white person or straight person, Christopher resembles an automaton, who becomes a paragon of economic productivity, devoid of racial difference or sexual desire. Rather than external psychic assaults such as the legalized prohibition of homosexual relationships, internal psychic assaults become created in a culture of productivity. "Whiteness" becomes a property that people can accumulate through economic productivity. In the age of queer liberalism, where sustained economic growth is prioritized over everything else for human progress, homosexuality is accepted but unconnected with persistent structures of institutional racism. Christopher learns the gestures and habits of middle and upper class white culture so that he can fit in, subsuming his own desires and the various pieces of his self to this image of a false self. Eng and Han argues that Asian American and ethnic studies have the capacity to provide a hodling environment that brings various fragments parts of ourselves together. We should cultivate the ability to tolerate paradoxes and multiple narratives - only by naming our various losses can we transform difference into identity, rather than presupposing identity politics onto the many selves that compose lived experience.

[huttson-blog]

The Stories We Tell, and Don’t Tell, About Asian-American Lives — The New Yorker

Read more at The New Yorker

— by Hua Hsu: In the mid-nineties, David Eng was a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia, and Shinhee Han, a psychotherapist, worked for the school’s counselling and psychological services. After a seemingly popular Korean-American undergraduate at Columbia committed suicide, Eng and Han got to talking about what seemed, to them, like a wave of…

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[canadachronicles]

"Being selected as the flag-bearer at my fourth Paralympics is the highest honour I could receive for dedicating my life and heart to the Paralympic movement" Wheelchair Basketball player David Eng will lead Team Canada at the Rio Paralympics Opening Ceremony tonight! I'm so happy, Olympics withdrawal was really bad!!!

[allslost]

“[Heterosexual identity is thus “purchased through a melancholic incorporation of the love that it disavows: the man who insists upon the coherence of his heterosexuality will claim that he never loved another man, and hence never lost another man...that love, that attachment, becomes subject to a double disavowal, a never having loved, and a never having lost. This “never-never” thus founds the heterosexual subject, as it were; it is an identity based upon the refusal to avow an attachment and hence, the refusal to grieve.” -Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power

“If the normative heterosexual white male seems untroubled by this disavowal, is it the task of the psychoanalyst to engineer its undoing?” -A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia, David Eng and Shinhee Han

[betalevel]

David Eng at Errata Salon.

[b-case]

"...i would like to suggest that intimacy might be regarded as a type of racialized property right that remains unequally and unevenly distributed among gay and lesbian populations today.  in other words, queer liberalism extends the right of privacy to gay and lesbian u.s. citizen-subjects willing to comply with its normative dictates of bourgeois intimacy, and able to afford the comforts of bourgeois domesticity in their reconfigured globalized incarnations.  in this sense, queer liberalism is  not necessarily about excluding bourgeois racial subjects from its aegis.  to the contrary, it is about failing to recognize the racial genealogy of exploitation and domination that underwrites the very inclusion of queers and queers of color in this abstract liberal policy." 

[colorblinding]

Critical Race Theory: Racial Melancholia

On August 15, 2000, Psychoanalytic Dialogues, a leading international journal for psychoanalytic theoreticians and clinical practitioners within the field of interpersonal psychoanalysis, released the fourth issue of its tenth volume. Included in this issue was a thirty-four page research article, “A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia,” by David L. Eng (a professor of Comparative Literature) and Shinhee Han (a psychotherapist). This interdisciplinary study was based on a series of dialogues between Eng and Han during the autumn and winter of 1998, and uses two case histories of university students as well as a number of Asian American cultural productions in literature and film as evidence.

Five months later, in November 2000, Oxford University Press released Anne Anlin Cheng’s The Melancholy of Race, a book described by the publisher as a “groundbreaking, interdisciplinary study [that] understands racial grief not only as the result of racism but also as a foundation for racial identity.”  Like Eng and Han, Cheng employs a case study and cultural productions as evidence for racial melancholia, a theoretical paradigm which uncritically deploys Freud’s theory of mourning and melancholia to examine the production and sustainment of racial identity and subjectivity as a result of racial injury. Eng, Han, and Cheng contend racial melancholia is a universal experience for Asian Americans, underpins all racial conflicts and struggles, and is instrumental in both racial group identification as well as individual subjectivity. 

For the psychoanalytic theoretician, racial melancholia can be a useful methodological approach for analyzing “the constitutive role that grief plays in racial/ethnic subject-formation” (Cheng xi).  For the clinical practitioner, racial melancholia can offer a deeper understanding of Asian American mental health issues in clinical practice (Eng and Han 667).  Like most psychoanalytic theories, racial melancholia’s conclusions are universal, and attempts to function as scientific truth.  Despite the polemical climate within the field of critical theory, racial melancholia has remained unchallenged in the ten years it has been in vogue in both the university and the field of psychoanalysis. Scholarly publications utilizing this methodology continue to proliferate in journals of psychoanalytic research and the humanities, transcending Asian American identity to incorporate all racial minorities.

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In his article, “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud analyzes both mourning and melancholia – the ways in which people react to the death of a loved object. He suggests that mourning is a period of serious distress and depression, but will eventually heal itself through the withdrawal of desire from that object gradually. Melancholia, on the other hand, is a pathological mourning; its symptoms are persistent and result in obsessive self-degradation and self-hatred.  This self-loathing is a form of self-preservation: it protects the melancholic from feelings of guilt that would result from acknowledging the ambivalence felt towards the lost object, which the melancholic both loves and hates simultaneously.  Instead of confessing this ambivalence, melancholia results in identification with the lost object through a process of introjection: the ego becomes the lost object by metaphorically cannabilizing it, taking it into itself. 

Racial melancholia is a state of being psychically stuck due to a pathological interminability that resists substitution of a lost, idealized racial perfection, defined by dominant white culture.

To the extent that ideals of whiteness for Asian Americans (and other groups of color) remain unattainable, processes of assimilation are suspended, conflicted, and unresolved. The irresolution of this process places the concept of assimilation within a melancholic framework…Melancholia describes an unresolved process…to describe the unstable immigration and suspended assimilation of Asian Americans into the national fabric. This suspended assimilation…suggests that, for Asian Americans, ideals of whiteness are continually estranged.  They remain at an unattainable distance, at once a compelling fantasy and a lost ideal. (Eng and Han, 670)

Cheng contends:

Racial melancholia affects both dominant white culture and racial others: indeed, racial melancholia describes the dynamics that constitute their mutual definition through exclusion. The terms thus denote a complex process of racial rejection and desire on the parts of whites and nonwhites that expresses itself in abject and manic forms. On the one side, white American identity and its authority is secured through the melancholic introjections of racial others that it can neither fully relinquish nor accommodate and whose ghostly presence nonetheless guarantees its centrality. On the other side, the racial other…also suffers from racial melancholia whereby his or her racial identity is imaginatively reinforced through the introjections of a lost, never-possible perfection, an inarticulable loss that comes to inform the individual’s sense of his or her own subjectivity. (xi)

In the model of racial melancholia, the dominant white man requires the presence of the racial other in order to uphold his authority which he arrives at only through the systematic exclusion of the other.  The white man, who represents the ideal of American identity, perceives of his own superiority through the difference he sees in the excluded racial other who cannot become white (cannot assimilate), and thus, cannot truly become American.  As whiteness is idealized, it becomes that which nonwhites aspire to, yet can never attain.  This inability to attain perfection produces profound racial injury and grief.  The pathological mourning of the lost object, which the racial other desires but resents, and the introjection of the object by the racial other’s taking the object into his or her ego, ultimately produces the racial other’s sense subjectivity as other: nonwhite, outside of perfection, and incapable of assimilation or obtaining the racial ideal he or she pathologically mourns for.

As I’ve previously mentioned, racial melancholia provides a universal framework for understanding how racial subjectivity is formed.  In respects to Asian American identity, which this post is most concerned with, such a framework is politically troubling. Keith Osajima contends that psychological theories of race “privilege reason and rationality, and the possibility of realizing a coherent, unified identity” (1995: 30) instead of acknowledging the plurality, heterogeneity, indeterminacy, and locality of Asian American identity. Ruth Gim contends:

The notion of an Asian American [identity] is generally predicated on an identity that is transcendent of specific ethnicity…The use of a collective term is not without hazards.  It is deceptive in its simplicity and belies a sense of homogeneity that in reality does not exist.  It serves to perpetuate the popular misconception that Asian Americans are all alike. This myth has been reified in the academic arena where Asian Americans and other people of color are perceived simplistically and treated as unidimensional beings with race as the only, or primary, dimension of salience… Furthermore, early studies on Asian Americans were conducted on Chinese and Japanese Americans then generalized to the entire Asian American population, or worse, there was no thought given to generalization because of the perception that Chinese and Japanese Americans constituted the entirety of the Asian American population. (1995: 413)

To assign a universal model of race to Asian American identity not only closes all ethnicities that can be considered “Asian” within this model, but also fixes each individual who must undergo the process of racial melancholia in order to arrive at his or her own individual racial subjectivity. 

While the employment of a collective identity can be politically strategic in its reminder of a shared history of racial injury, the trouble with racial melancholia’s universality is that it diagnoses and treats racial subjectivity as a product of psychic defect, medicalizing the process of racialization in order to produce a discourse on race.  According to Osajima:

Psychologists, for too long, have uncritically applied modernist psychological theories and methods to the study of Asian Americans.  Drawing credibility from a scientific “regime of truth” featuring “validated scales, “controlled experimental designs,” and “statistically significant” findings, psychological studies have unfortunately developed a pathological interpretation of Asian Americans…This unwittingly reinforces a tendency of Asian Americans to blame themselves for experiencing dislocations in American society, and diverts attention away from the historical and structural impact of racism. A postmodern analysis can critically examine, not the individual who is deemed abnormal or pathological, but the practice and discourse of psychology that relies so heavily on positivistic models that locate blame on the individual. (30)

Furthermore, the language that is used in explicating racial melancholia uses the rhetoric of blame and victimization: racial identity is produced due to racial injury; the racial other grieves for an unattainable white status due to systematic exclusion by dominant white culture, which must injure the racial other in order to maintain its own security.  Racial melancholia not only blames both white culture for its victimization of the racial other, and the racial other for his or her desire for the lost object of mourning, but it also conceptualizes racialization in purely binary terms: the white oppressor and the injured racial other.

Moreover, racial melancholia’s reliance upon a precondition of white superiority (equating whiteness with racial perfection) in order to produce racial subjectivity through racial injury and pathological mourning by the racial other privileges whiteness as having some kind of originary superior value.  Within this framework, whiteness is constituted only through the introjection of the racial other as other by the white subject.  Somehow, both identities (whiteness/racial otherness) emerge from and out of one another and only through this melancholic and signifying process. The argument can be seen as follows: Without the melancholic racial other, white authority would therefore not exist; and without white authority, which it gains through its idealized role, the racial other would have no reason to even experience melancholia.  But without melancholia, racial subjectivity cannot be produced in the first place.  More problematically, racial melancholia requires a condition of exclusion of one class by another, an oppressed group by a dominant, but it fails to explore the nuances of why this exclusion occurs.  Its only explanation for exclusion is that the racial other cannot attain racial perfection, and therefore is excluded by dominant white culture. 

While racial melancholia can be a useful methodological tool in examining literature and film, I personally find it to be an extremely limiting theory in how it mobilizes psychoanalysis in order to offer a universal explanation for the mechanisms and experiences of racialization and racism. Despite these limitations, however, many Asian Americanists and critical race theorists are smitten with racial melancholia, and have been for the past ten years. Even theorists that don't normally write on race, such as Judith Butler, have contributed to the work done on racial melancholia. (Butler contributed by writing the afterword to David Eng's book, Loss.) 

It's interesting that even though racial melancholia is widely talked about and one of the current "hot trending theories" of the moment, it hasn't really been challenged or even critiqued. For those of you interested in critical race theory, what do you think about racial melancholia? 

For anyone researching racial melancholia for an academic work and would like to cite this Tumblr post, please contact me privately.