The Melancholy of Race

Download or read book The Melancholy of Race written by Anne Anlin Cheng and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2001 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.