The melancholy of race /
Pbk. subtitle: Psychoanalysis, assimilation, and hidden grief
Anne Anlin Cheng.
- Oxford [England] ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2000.
- xii, 271 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm.
- Race and American culture .
- Race and American culture. .
Includes bibliographical references (pages 233-249) and index.
The Melancholy of Race -- Beauty and Ideal Citizenship: Inventing Asian America in Rodgers and Hammerstein's Flower Drum Song (1961) -- A Fable of Exquisite Corpses: Maxine Hong Kingston, Assimilation, and the Hypochondriacal Response -- Fantasy's Repulsion and Investment: David Henry Hwang and Ralph Ellison -- History in/against the Fragment: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha -- Difficult Loves: Anne Deavere Smith and the Politics of Grief. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
"In this 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 - a social 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 reasoned account 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 reimaging of progressive politics. 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, and in the process demonstrates that racial melancholia permeates our fantasies of citizenship, assimilation, and social health. 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 provocative look at a timely subject, this study is essential reading for anyone interested in race studies, critical theory, or psychoanalysis."--Jacket.
0195134036 9780195134032 0195151623 9780195151626
00026833
National characteristics, American. Melancholy in literature. Melancholy in art. Minorities in literature. Minorities in art. American literature--Asian American authors--History and criticism. American literature--African American authors--History and criticism. Asian American arts--Psychological aspects. African American arts--Psychological aspects. Ethnische Beziehungen Literatur Nationale Minderheit Psychische Eigenschaft American literature--African American authors. American literature--Asian American authors. Melancholy in art. Melancholy in literature. Minorities in art. Minorities in literature. National characteristics, American. Race relations--Psychological aspects.
United States--Race relations--Psychological aspects. USA USA. United States.