Academic David L. Eng and psychotherapist Shinhee Han first met in the mid-1990s when they were brought together by their collective sorrow by a spate of student suicides at Columbia University. Don’t miss this special discussion of their new book, Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation (Duke University Press 2019), which explores the psychic trauma of Asian American young adults from Generation X to Generation Y who they associate respectively with melancholia and dissociation. Through critical race theory and psychoanalytic theory, Eng and Han explore the loss of migration, displacement, and assimilation, as well as Asian American tropes such as coming out, transnational adoption, and model minority stereotypes.
This event is cosponsored by the Asian Women Giving Circle.
In Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation critic David L. Eng and psychotherapist Shinhee Han draw on case histories from the mid-1990s to the present to explore the social and psychic predicaments of Asian American young adults from Generation X to Generation Y. Combining critical race theory with several strands of psychoanalytic thought, they develop the concepts of racial melancholia and racial dissociation to investigate changing processes of loss associated with immigration, displacement, diaspora, and assimilation. These case studies of first- and second-generation Asian Americans deal with a range of difficulties, from depression, suicide, and the politics of coming out to broader issues of the model minority stereotype, transnational adoption, parachute children, colorblind discourses in the United States, and the rise of Asia under globalization. As Columbia University Professor Mae Ngai writes: “A most illuminating and productive dialogue about the dark side of the model minority stereotype, where theory meets practice, the social meets the personal, and the material meets the psychic. David L. Eng and Shinhee Han have given us new ways to think about the problems facing Asian American students, including their disturbing rate of suicide on college campuses.”
A former board member of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, David L. Eng is Richard L. Fisher Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania.
Shinhee Han is a psychotherapist at The New School and in private practice in New York City.
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AAWW is a national not-for-profit arts organization devoted to the creating, publishing, developing and disseminating of creative writing by Asian Americans-in other words, we’re the preeminent organization dedicated to the belief that Asian American stories deserve to be told.
We’re building the Asian literary culture of tomorrow through our curatorial platform, which includes our New York events series and our online editorial initiatives. In a time when China and India are on the rise, when immigration is a vital electoral issue, when the detention of Muslim Americans is a matter of common practice, we believe Asian American literature is vital to interpret our post-multicultural but not post-racial age. Our curatorial take is intellectual and alternative, pop cultural and highbrow, warm and artistically innovative, and vested in New York City communities.
Our curatorial platform is premised on the idea of a big-tent Asian American cultural pluralism. We’re interested in both the New York publishing industry and ethnic studies, the South Asian diasporic novel and the Asian American story of assimilation, high culture and pop culture, Lisa Lowe and Amar Chitra Katha, avant-garde poetry and spoken word, journalism and critical race theory, Midnight’s Children and Dictee. We are against both an exclusive literary culture that believes that race does not exist and Asian American narratives that lead to self-stereotyping and limit the menu of our identity. We are for inventing the future of Asian American literary culture. Named one of the top five Asian American groups nationally, covered by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and Poets & Writers, we are a safe community space and an anti-racist counterculture, incubating new ideas and interpretations of what it means to be both an American and a global citizen.