Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans by David L. Eng and Shinhee Han

Abstract

Reviewed by: Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans by David L. Eng and Shinhee Han Corinne Mitsuye Sugino (bio) Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans, by David L. Eng and Shinhee Han. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2019. 232 pp. $25.95 paperback. ISBN: 978-1-4780-0160-7. In Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans, David L. Eng, a humanities professor, and Shinhee Han, a psychotherapist, consider how Asian Americans navigate racism, loss, and grief in the contemporary era. The book centers around two concepts in generation X and Y Asian Americans, respectively: racial melancholia and racial dissociation. While racial melancholia refers to the way racial loss is “condensed into a forfeited object whose significance must be deciphered and unraveled for its social meaning,” racial dissociation describes “histories of racial loss that are dispersed across a wide social terrain, histories whose origins and implications remain insistently diffuse and obscure” (1). Each chapter focuses on case histories involving Asian American patients and students. Drawing on critical race theory and psychoanalysis, Eng and Han consider how psychic processes [End Page 342] are embedded within a larger racialized environment, as well as how conceptions of subject-object misrecognition provide insights about racialization. They also offer critiques of both fields, contending that critical race theory frequently focuses on material inequality while leaving its connections to psychic phenomena underexplored, while psychoanalysis has “not considered adequately how the universal subject of psychoanalysis is not just a gendered (male) but a raced (white) subject” (18). Consequently, Eng and Han attend to the interplay between psychic and social processes of racialization. The first two chapters focus on racial melancholia, building on Eng and Han’s previous (2000) article, “A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia.”1 They draw on Freud’s distinction between mourning, as the ability to let go of certain objects to invest in new ones, and melancholia, as the inability to move on from a lost object. Yet rather than characterize melancholia as a pathological psychic trait, Eng and Han consider it as embedded within structures such as racism and immigration. For them, whiteness often functions as a lost object resulting in a melancholic process; many Asian Americans are socialized to identify with whiteness as an unattainable ideal. Eng and Han’s work is thus salient for thinking about the violence of assimilation. Moreover, Asian Americans often feel guilt and a burden to make up for their immigrant parents’ sacrifices. This isn’t the case for all Asian Americans, however. Because they do not have immigrant families in the United States, transnational adoptees contend with feelings of loss relating to family and national belonging differently. For example, Mina, an adoptee from Korea, “mourns the loss of her birth mother and motherland” (67) while psychically splitting her “good” white mother from her “bad” Korean mother. This demonstrates how melancholia can involve the psychic separation of good and bad objects. Eng and Han describe Mina’s healing process as one of “racial reparation” insofar as it seeks to loosen strict divisions between hate, love, and good and bad objects. Moreover, they point to the importance of considering race as a continually evolving relation rather than fixed. Eng and Han’s concept finds resonance with Jinah Kim’s work on melancholia in her 2019 book, Postcolonial Grief: The Afterlives of the Pacific Wars in the Americas.2 Kim similarly resists pathologizing melancholia as a maladaptive coping strategy, interrogating its relationship to racial power. Nevertheless, Kim’s focus remains slightly different insofar as she explores racial melancholia as an insurgent cultural force that disrupts liberal humanist frameworks for reconciliation, while Eng and Han focus on how racial melancholia impacts the way Asian Americans navigate grief, assimilation, and loss. The distinctions and overlap between these scholars thus produce productive tensions that scholars might engage with in considering the nuances of how racial melancholia impacts both macropolitical structures and personal experiences. [End Page 343] The latter half of Eng and Han’s book theorizes racial dissociation. While racial melancholia reflects a process in which one can name a lost object...