You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This a challenging book to read, both because of its somewhat militant arguments and because of the often-convoluted academic prose. The
purpose of the book, in the authors’ words, is “to draw conscious attention to the polarizing racial histories that both overdetermine and complicate our social and psychic relations in and with the world” (p. 20). The book is a collaboration between David Eng, a professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, and Shinhee Han, a psychotherapist in New York.
The authors move from theories of desire, repression, and internal models of psychic life to more relational models of attachment, conflict, and trauma organizing interpsychic lives. They frame their understanding on the work of Melanie Klein, and there is a lack of theoretical coherence in the conceptualizations and the premises they work from could have been explained in a more cogent manner.
The impetus for the book was the authors’ concern about the high rate of suicide among Asian-American students. The authors believe that a contributor to this phenomenon is the lack of acknowledgement and understanding of the social violence and psychic pain afflicting Asian-American students. Furthermore, the authors contend that psychoanalysts remain blind to this everyday violence and emphasize the paradox that we inhabit a so-called colorblind and post-racial society inundated with discourse on multiculturalism, while at the same time witnessing ongoing and escalating racial discord and violence.
In their view, the idea of race in the United States is embedded in social relationships and mediated by long standing processes of social inclusion and exclusion. Current conceptualizations of race in America, they argue, are shaped by the historical trace of the longstanding designation of European whites (and their descendants) as having the status of subjects; such status entails the exclusion of others. The authors emphasize the convenience for whites of forgetting the long histo