The Melancholy of Race

The Melancholy of Race
Author: Anne Anlin Cheng
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2001
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0195151623

Cheng 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 reimagining of progressive politics.

The Melancholy of Race

The Melancholy of Race
Author: Anne Anlin Cheng
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2000-11-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 019988112X

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--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 reimagining 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, in the process demonstrating 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.

Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation

Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation
Author: David L. Eng
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 235
Release: 2019-01-17
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1478002689

In Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation critic David L. Eng and psychotherapist Shinhee Han draw on case histories from the mid-1990s to the present to explore the social and psychic predicaments of Asian American young adults from Generation X to Generation Y. Combining critical race theory with several strands of psychoanalytic thought, they develop the concepts of racial melancholia and racial dissociation to investigate changing processes of loss associated with immigration, displacement, diaspora, and assimilation. These case studies of first- and second-generation Asian Americans deal with a range of difficulties, from depression, suicide, and the politics of coming out to broader issues of the model minority stereotype, transnational adoption, parachute children, colorblind discourses in the United States, and the rise of Asia under globalization. Throughout, Eng and Han link psychoanalysis to larger structural and historical phenomena, illuminating how the study of psychic processes of individuals can inform investigations of race, sexuality, and immigration while creating a more sustained conversation about the social lives of Asian Americans and Asians in the diaspora.

Ornamentalism

Ornamentalism
Author: Anne Anlin Cheng
Publisher:
Total Pages: 223
Release: 2019
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0190604611

Ornamentalism offers one of the first sustained and original theories of Asiatic femininity. Examining ornamentality, in lieu of Orientalism, as a way to understand the representation, circulation, and ontology of Asiatic femininity, this study extends our vocabulary about the woman of color beyond the usual platitudes about objectification.

Encyclopedia of Critical Whiteness Studies in Education

Encyclopedia of Critical Whiteness Studies in Education
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 778
Release: 2020-12-07
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9004444831

The Encyclopedia of Critical Whiteness Studies in Education offers readers a broad summary of the multifaceted and interdisciplinary field of critical whiteness studies, the study of white racial identities in the context of white supremacy, in education.

Cultural Melancholy

Cultural Melancholy
Author: Jermaine Singleton
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2015-11-12
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780252039621

A daring cultural and literary studies investigation, Cultural Melancholy explores the legacy of unresolved grief produced by ongoing racial oppression and resistance in the United States. Using acute analysis of literature, drama, musical performance, and film, Singleton demonstrates how rituals of racialization and resistance transfer and transform melancholy discreetly across time, consolidating racial identities and communities along the way. He also argues that this form of impossible mourning binds racialized identities across time and social space by way of cultural resistance efforts. Singleton develops the concept of "cultural melancholy" as a response to scholarship that calls for the separation of critical race studies and psychoanalysis, excludes queer theoretical approaches from readings of African American literatures and cultures, and overlooks the status of racialized performance culture as a site of serious academic theorization. In doing so, he weaves critical race studies, psychoanalysis, queer theory, and performance studies into conversation to uncover a host of hidden dialogues—psychic and social, personal and political, individual and collective—for the purpose of promoting a culture of racial grieving, critical race consciousness, and collective agency. Wide-ranging and theoretically bold, Cultural Melancholy counteracts the racial legacy effects that plague our twenty-first century multiculture.

The Nature of Race

The Nature of Race
Author: Ann Morning
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 326
Release: 2011-06-24
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0520270312

Includes bibliographical references (p. 279-303) and index.

Orozco's American Epic

Orozco's American Epic
Author: Mary K. Coffey
Publisher: Duke University Press Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2020-02-28
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9781478002987

Between 1932 and 1934, José Clemente Orozco painted the twenty-four-panel mural cycle entitled The Epic of American Civilization in Dartmouth College's Baker-Berry Library. An artifact of Orozco's migration from Mexico to the United States, the Epic represents a turning point in his career, standing as the only fresco in which he explores both US-American and Mexican narratives of national history, progress, and identity. While his title invokes the heroic epic form, the mural indicts history as complicit in colonial violence. It questions the claims of Manifest Destiny in the United States and the Mexican desire to mend the wounds of conquest in pursuit of a postcolonial national project. In Orozco's American Epic Mary K. Coffey places Orozco in the context of his contemporaries, such as Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros, and demonstrates the Epic's power as a melancholic critique of official indigenism, industrial progress, and Marxist messianism. In the process, Coffey finds within Orozco's work a call for justice that resonates with contemporary debates about race, immigration, borders, and nationality.

Whitewashing Race

Whitewashing Race
Author: Michael K. Brown
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 398
Release: 2023-01-03
Genre: Family & Relationships
ISBN: 0520385861

In an updated new edition of this classic work, a team of highly respected sociologists, political scientists, economists, criminologists, and legal scholars scrutinize the resilience of racial inequality in twenty-first-century America. Whitewashing Race argues that contemporary racism manifests as discrimination in nearly every realm of American life, and is further perpetuated by failures to address the compounding effects of generations of disinvestment. Police violence, mass incarceration of Black people, employment and housing discrimination, economic deprivation, and gross inequities in health care combine to deeply embed racial inequality in American society and economy. Updated to include the most recent evidence, including contemporary research on the racially disparate effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, this edition of Whitewashing Race analyzes the consequential and ongoing legacy of "disaccumulation" for Black communities and lives. While some progress has been made, the authors argue that real racial justice can be achieved only if we actively attack and undo pervasive structural racism and its legacies.

Postcolonial Melancholia

Postcolonial Melancholia
Author: Paul Gilroy
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2004-12-29
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0231509693

In an effort to deny the ongoing effect of colonialism and imperialism on contemporary political life, the death knell for a multicultural society has been sounded from all sides. That's the provocative argument Paul Gilroy makes in this unorthodox defense of the multiculture. Gilroy's searing analyses of race, politics, and culture have always remained attentive to the material conditions of black people and the ways in which blacks have defaced the "clean edifice of white supremacy." In Postcolonial Melancholia, he continues the conversation he began in the landmark study of race and nation 'There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack' by once again departing from conventional wisdom to examine—and defend—multiculturalism within the context of the post-9/11 "politics of security." This book adapts the concept of melancholia from its Freudian origins and applies it not to individual grief but to the social pathology of neoimperialist politics. The melancholic reactions that have obstructed the process of working through the legacy of colonialism are implicated not only in hostility and violence directed at blacks, immigrants, and aliens but in an inability to value the ordinary, unruly multiculture that has evolved organically and unnoticed in urban centers. Drawing on the seminal discussions of race begun by Frantz Fanon, W. E. B. DuBois, and George Orwell, Gilroy crafts a nuanced argument with far-reaching implications. Ultimately, Postcolonial Melancholia goes beyond the idea of mere tolerance to propose that it is possible to celebrate the multiculture and live with otherness without becoming anxious, fearful, or violent.