Events - Event View

Title: Racial Melancholia, Guilt, and Repair

Presenter: David Eng, PhD

Date/Time: March 23, 2024 10:00 am – 3:00 pm Central Time

Location: The Center for Integrative Counseling and Psychology

Credit Hours: 4 CE hours

Description:

Asian Americans are conventionally described as “middle-man minorities,” outside of dominant racial paradigms of white and black, adjunct to white privilege and exempt from the brunt of systemic violence directed against black people. Historical accounts of the in-betweenness of Asian Americans trace their origins to how Asian coolie labor has served to triangulate white capital and African slavery over the course of European modernity. If this is the material history of in-betweenness, what is the psychic corollary of the middle-man thesis? Through an analysis of the Netflix dark comedy series Beef, as well as case histories of Asian American patients and students, I argue that the psychic effects of occupying a racially intermediate position implicate an unexplored terrain of racial rage and racial guilt that Asian Americans are insistently socialized to hold on behalf of others.

Learning Objectives:

1. To consider the relationship between psychoanalysis and race

2. To understand different social and psychic mechanisms connected to processes of Asian American racialization

3. To investigate the ways in which losses connected to immigration, assimilation, and racialization processes are mediated, mitigated, and exacerbated through guilt for Asian Americans

Presenter/References/Reading (as applicable):

Asibong, A. “Walking on Thin Ice: Discussion of Kris Yi’s ‘Asian American Experience: The Illusion of Inclusion and the Model Minority Stereotype’,” Psychoanalytic Dialogues 33.1 (2023): 60-68.

Brown, W. States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).

Davids, M. F. Internal Racism: A Psychoanalytic Approach to Race and Difference (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

Eng, D. L. “Colonial Object Relations,” Social Text 34.1 (2016): 1-19.  

Eng, D. L. & Han, S. Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019).

Fanon, F. Black Skin, White Mask, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove, 1963).

Klein, M. “Love, Guilt and Reparation,” in Love, Hate and Reparation (New York: Norton, 1964).

Lee, SJ, dir. Beef Netflix Series (2023). 

Lorde, A. “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism,” Keynote Presentation, The National Women’s Studies Association Conference, Storrs, Connecticut (June 1981). Web access <https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/speeches-african-american-history/1981-audre-lorde-uses-anger-women-responding-racism/>

Hong, CP, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (New York: Penguin, 2021).

Rothberg, M. The Implicated Subject (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019).

Sedgwick, E. K. “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” in Touching Feeling (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). 

Stephens, M. “Getting Next to Ourselves: The Interpersonal Dimensions of 

Double-Consciousness,” Contemporary Psychoanalysis 56.2-3 (2020): 201-225. 

Winnicott, D. W. “The Development of the Capacity for Concern,” in The Maturational Process and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional 

Development (New York: International, 1965), 73-82.