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Eng and Han's most recent collaboration, Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans, begins to chart the largely unmapped territory of Asian American experiences and psychoanalysis. Eng, a male Chinese American humanities professor, and Han, a female Korean American psychotherapist, have demonstrated their commitment to interdisciplinary scholarship during their fruitful 20-year partnership. This latest installment opens up exciting possibilities for the intersections between critical race theory, psychoanalysis (both clinical and discursive), and Asian American subjectivities.
This reworking of four papers is a supple example of reflexivity, positionality, and relationality that offers refreshing new perspectives on foundational concepts of psychoanalytic theory. The book nuances overwrought tropes of Asian American experiences (e.g., the model minority myth and intergenerational narratives of sacrifice for the American dream), and gives voice to different kinds of pain that these narratives otherwise run the risk of concealing.
In considering race as relation, Eng and Han think of “race as a verb, race as historical processes of racialization” and as dynamic (p. 12). For Asian Americans in particular, some of the predominant related themes include: intergenerational conflict; visuality; language; achievement; unmourned loss and ghosts; and the confusion between stereotype and identity (via mimicry). These thematic preoccupations stand in relationship to other aspects that influence Asian American subjectivities, such as immigration status, various kinds of privilege or disadvantage, adoption status, gender, sexuality, and personal family dynamics, to name a few.
With respect to Whiteness as property, Eng and Han, drawing on Harris's (1993) work, explore the idea that the main characteristic of Whiteness over time has been and continues to be the right to exclude. Specifically in relation to Asian American racialization