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The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief by Anne Anlin Cheng. New York: Oxford University Press, Inc., 2001. Pp. ix + 271. $29.95.
The Melancholy of Race should be read both for its acumen and for its politics. The book's discussion of "racial melancholia" clarifies the psychological terms organizing the dynamics of race and what politics can be voiced based on those dynamics. In other words, Anne Anlin Cheng's book provides vocabulary for understanding the invisible aspects of race, particularly racial subjection, which tends to be ignored by the conventional politics of claiming grievances against racial injustice. Cheng wants us to pause on the important psychoanalytic distinction between grievance and grief and in so doing allow for the rethinking or retheorizing of the terms through which race is represented as well as experienced.
One might criticize Cheng for narrowing her discussion to two race categories-Asian American and African American-even while she mentions Native American and Latino as sidebars, but I see her choice as "strategic." With reference to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's notion of "strategic essentialism," Cheng is quite wary of facile race categories, selecting Asian American and African American for their historically situated positions in hegemonic conceptualizations of the American nation, especially in current dialogues on race. The black-white dyad dominates American talk on race domestically; when attention turns international, Asians versus whites dominate:
With black and white as the dominant racial categories, historical memory tends to overlook the fierce contestation over the shades, as it were, in between-conflicts that involve not just ideological differences but economic and social privileges. Indeed, the formulation of the government's sovereign power to exclude is historically tied to the definitions of aliens and citizens. Well before Brown, there was a series of key rulings in school segregation, in addition to the wellknown Plessy v. Ferguson, that involved the problem of racializing Asians in this country. . . . [In fact,] during the Brown litigations, the constitutionality of racialization-as-segregation in the form of Japanese internment (Korematsu v. U.S.) was relegitimated on the grounds that "national security" was at stake... the history of virulent racism against Asians and Asian Americans has been at once consistently upheld and denied. Shuttling between "black" and "white"-the Scylla and Charybdis between which all...