The meanings of melancholy. . - Reviews - book review

Anne Anlin Cheng. The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. 271 pp., 6 b/wills. S29.95.

"We are a nation at ease with grievance but not with grief." So writes Anne Anlin Cheng in the preface of her powerful, demanding, and often moving book on the subjective experiences of race and racism in America. In making a distinction between "grievance" and "grief," Cheng distinguishes between the contemporary willingness to address and redress racism and racial oppression through legal and political means and the apparent unwillingness to regard, indeed the reflex to dismiss or disregard, the psychical, interior experience of being a denigrated person in a still-racist society. While grievance speaks the language of material and social recompense and has become the most visible and often controversial means by which people of color seek an acknowledged place in society, the grief, for her, is really the more important subject to explore since it is the fundamental basis for the "social and subjective formations of the so-called racialized," but it has usually remained "inchoate because it is not fully re concilable to the vocabulary of social formulation or ideology" (x). Through several case studies, ranging widely across different media and disciplines--the film version of Rodgers and Hammerstein's musical Flower Drum Song, Maxine Hong Kingston's novel The Woman Warrior, Ralph Ellison's novel Invisible Man, David Henry Hwang's play M. Butterfly, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's book Dictee, and Anna Deavere Smith's performance piece Twilight--Cheng means to rectify this imbalance, suggesting in the process a theoretical framework by which we can understand and value racial grief.

Central to Cheng's analyses are tools foraged from psychoanalysis, particularly those from Sigmund Freud's famous essay, "Mourning and Melancholia" (1917). For Cheng, racial grief is, as Freud wrote of melancholy, an internalization of and identification with loss, a traumatic wounding that, despite or perhaps because of its pathological dimensions, gives rise to an ego. The sense of self for a racialized person, like Freud's melancholic, can be characterized by a "convoluted, ongoing, generative, and at times self-contradicting negotiation with pain" (15), a deep pain that institutes, manages, and legislates a lifelong internal drama. This pain, or "racial melancholia" as Cheng calls it, is not incidental or peripheral to the sense of self; it is constitutive. Furthermore, it is not limited to racialized minorities but is felt by all people in this country, both white and non-white, because it is the foundation of the structure upon which America's most important social relations have been built. Indeed, "do minant culture's relation to the raced other displays an entangled network of repulsion and sympathy, fear and desire, repudiation and identification" (12). In short, racial melancholia has been a basis not only for racialization in this country but also, and equally important, for the deepest kinds of socialization and sense of self. (1)

The implications of these premises are borne out in the first several case studies. In her analysis of Flower Drum Song (1961). for example, Cheng reads the campy Rodgers and Hammerstein musical as evidence of what a new, more racially diverse citizenry suggested to a racist society in the early 1960s, a few short years after the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act had abolished restrictions on Asian immigration. in this story about illegal immigration, generational conflict between Chinese immigrants and their American-born children, and a contest over ideal female beauty, Asian-American characters are made to harbor the anxieties and ambivalences of their white audience: interracial threat, namely in the appearance of a seemingly acculturated San Francisco Chinese population, masquerades as a story of intraracial and family conflict between the Chinese in a modern America and those from an old China. Flower Drum Song purports to stage and make pleasurable a fantasy of assimilation, but for Cheng it ends up staging its opposite, a thinly disguised anxiety about the grounds of white Americanism. Moreover, despite the assumption that the Chinese in Flower Drum Song are "becoming" American, assimilation is never really a possibility, but only an illusion upon which racial melancholia plays and which it habitually reinvents. In one of the most original readings of the story's least resolved aspect, the casting aside as a love interest of the seemingly perfect Helen Chao, Cheng explains: "Although in many ways she is the image of the ideal new citizen, Helen's beauty and the cultural harmony it promises cannot be looked at, cannot remain in representation. . . . [Her] marital ineligibility reflects her social and national ineligibility. ...[She] stands as the secret abjection of the racial assimilation that the diegesis claims to celebrate" (62).

If Flower Drum Song suggests the racial melancholia at the heart of the white national imaginary, then The Woman Warrior (1976) evokes the melancholia of a racialized minority. For Cheng the novel can be characterized by its preoccupation with hypochondria, a facet of melancholia in that it is the irrational fear of contamination and disease. If, in the usual sense, a hypochondriac experiences the world through an unsettling preoccupation with a phantom illness, in Asian-American literature the hypochondriac, caught between the promises and anxieties of assimilation and the multicultural lure of origins and authenticity, compulsively compares his or her marked body against the "socially immaculate body" of an internalized ideal (72). Moreover, it is the continual management of that comparison, which always points to a lack on the part of the Asian-American and always provides new fodder for racial grief, that gives rise to something like an Asian-American subjectivity, "the corpse that lives on, the body that resists mere materiality and dreams of company in the impoverishment of sociality" (102). Unlike previous commentators who have read Kingston's novel against a backdrop of Chinatown politics and therefore within the orbit of what she would call a discourse of grievance, Cheng sees in the book an "anguished, almost performative call. . . [a reminder that] cultural claims are almost always contaminated by alterity... [and a statement that a] unified, whole, discrete community of 'Chinese Americans' is above all else an imagined one" (100-101).