Inheritance of Loss: Whiteness and Racial Melancholia in Julia Cho’s BFE

Abstract

This paper explores how Asian Americans’ psychological reality affects the representation of Asian characters in Asian American playwrights’ works. Having been exposed to a series of systematic and institutional exclusion of white America for centuries, Asian Americans have come to conceive of whiteness as an object of perpetual loss, forming their identity as melancholic subjects. Borrowing ideas from David Eng and Shinhee Han’s “Racial Melancholia” which examines Asian Americans’ mental health, this paper illuminates how racial melancholia in reality seeps into the identity crisis of fictional characters, females in particular, using Julia Cho’s BFE (2005) as the primary text. To examine the viability of psychoanalytic ideas in the contemporary world, this paper firstly analyzes how Freudian concept of melancholia is racially expanded in Eng and Han’s theory. Then this paper moves on to illuminate Isabel’s racial melancholia in BFE, focusing on how futile pursuit of unobtainable white Phallus dominates her character, and how her melancholia is passed down to her daughter, Panny, despite her initial resistance. By examining BFE through an updated psychoanalytic frame of racial melancholia, this paper will argue that an acute diagnosis of Asian American community’s psychological reality lies at the bottom of Asian American writers’ voluntary representation of racial stereotypes.