The melancholy of race: psychoanalysis, assimilation and hidden grief

In this groundbreaking, interdisciplinary study Anne A.

Cheng argues that we have to understand racial grief not only as the result of racism but also as a foundation for racial identity.

She proposes that racial identification is itself already a melancholy 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, denigrated and idealized.

Drawing upon history,literature and theatre - the book ranges from Rodgers and Hammerstein to David Henry Whang, Brown v.

Board of Education to Anne Deveare Smith, Ralph Ellison to Maxine Hong Kingston - Cheng demonstrates that racial melancholia permeates our fantasies of citizenship, assimilation, and social health.

Aprovocative look at a timely cultural dilemma, this study is essential reading for anyone interested in race studies, critical theory, or psychoanalysis.