Author : Anne Anlin Cheng
Release : 2001
Genre : Literary Criticism
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 623/5 ( reviews)
Book Synopsis The Melancholy of Race by : Anne Anlin Cheng
Download or read book The Melancholy of Race written by Anne Anlin Cheng. This book was released on 2001. 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.