摘自

Cheng, Anne Anlin. 「The Melancholy of Race.」 The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001. 3-29

        In this first chapter of The Melancholy of Race, Anne Anlin Cheng, a college professor and specialist in race studies and psychoanalytic theory in 20th-century American literature, discusses racism in terms of its formation and its internalized psychical relation within individuals. Cheng first traces the history of racism and its impact on the constitution of American identity, and then delineates the formation of racial melancholy on the basis of Freud's theory. With the political, social and literary examples, Cheng demonstrates the melancholic responses of the subjectivity of the racial other and the white.

l Quantifying Grief (量化悲傷)

l Melancholic Formations (憂鬱成因)

l  Melancholic Responses (憂鬱回應)

l  Morphology of Ghostliness (化為鬼魅)

l  Race and Psychoanalysis (種族與精神分析)

Before going in-depth on the formation and exposition of the melancholy of race, Cheng contends that both social and psychological activities are involved with the operation of racism and its effects. She introduces three cases related to educational segregation to demonstrate the historical progress of racial equality in the United States. The three cases are Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and Stell v. Savannah-Chatham County Board of Education (1963). Cheng points out that the scientific data on the detrimental effects of racism on children of color, provided by NAACP (National Association of the Advancement of Colored People) lawyer Thurgood Marshall and two social psychologists (Kenneth and Mamie Clark) in the Brown case, were first used to challenge Plessy v. Ferguson. However, this very piece of evidence from social psychology was later cited to argue for educational segregation in the Stell case. With these historical events, Cheng show that racism is indeed a matter concerning not only sociology but also psychology. Consequently, the issue about race still influences the study of the sociologists and psychologists over the years.

The research on black college students of a social psychologist Claude M. Steele published in 1999, and the survey conducted by Mattel about children's racial preference regarding Barbie dolls published in 1995, for instance, can be two examples of the unending discussion on race and color. Instead of supporting the results of the surveys, magnifying the grief of the minority or finding cure in order to get over the history, Cheng intends to reveal the 「fraught network of ongoing psychical negotiation instigated and institutionalized by racism」 (7) and ask what is the meaning for 「social, political, and subjective beings to grieve」 (7). The shift from being a subject of grief to being a subject of grievance, in Cheng's words, can be the 「transformation . . . from suffering injury to speaking out against that injury」 (3). If the grief and grievance are derived from the injury owing to racism, the outcome of the transformation can be called the melancholy of race. In the next part of the chapter, Cheng discusses how this melancholy of race forms in America.

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l Melancholic Formations (憂鬱成因)

Racial melancholia, according to Cheng, is like an 「elaborate identificatory system based on psychical and social consumption-and-denial,」 (11) which can also be seen as an extension of Freud's idea in 「Mourning and Melancholia.」 According to Freud, the loss of a loved one shatters the object-relationship between the person and the object. Consequently, if this person fails to replace the lost object with another object, the ego of the person will become identical with the lost object, and this state might ultimately lead to the person's loss of ego. One's sense of self and identity are thus vulnerable or impoverished.

However, if the loss can be substituted by other objects, one is in the state of mourning, which is in a healthy state of recovery. On the contrary, if one is in the state of melancholia, he or she refuses substitution or return of the loss, and this refusal, according to Cheng, can be regarded as the melancholic ambivalence toward the object. Regardless of the bound relationship between the melancholic and the object, the prior would first 「deny loss as loss in order to sustain the fiction of possession」 and then 「make sure that the 『object' never returns」 (9).

Therefore, 「there is . . . an active exclusion and denial of the object」 at the heart of loss that contributes not only to a melancholic and haunted ego but also a ghostly object (9). Based on Freud's theory, Cheng asserts that the concepts of exclusion and denial can be applied to account for the racialization in the United States where 「a dominant, standard, white national ideal . . . is sustained by the exclusion-yet-retention of racialized others」 (10). In other words, this racial 「[m]elancholia . . . describes . . . an American ideological dilemma」 (11), which illustrates how the melancholic fails to completely reject or embrace the lost object.

To further exemplify her idea, Cheng quotes Michael Rogin and Thomas Jefferson's words to demonstrate the ambivalence and entanglement within the dominant white American identity in melancholia. On the one hand, Rogin declares, in his essay 「The Two Declarations of American Independence,」 that the freedom and liberty in America are, in effect, economically and philosophically supported by the minorities (African Americans, Jewish Americans, Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans, etc.) and their productivity; and on the other, Jefferson demonstrates, in his Notes on the State of Virginian, his discomfort seeing the paradoxical juxtaposition of the practice of slavery and the Declaration of Independence, which prioritizes human rights, freedom and equality.

However, it would be a false accusation to ascribe the blame of racism solely to the racists. Both the racists and the white liberals are directly involved with the racial melancholic activity—an activity of expelling and maintaining. The racists need the racial others as an object to hate and fight against, while the liberals require the discriminated racial others, before memorializing them, to strive for liberty and equality. On the other hand, those who deny or do not see the racial problem, as Cheng puts it, 「are the most melancholic of all」 (11), for the denial and indifference can be a demonstration of their hidden fear and guilt to cope with the existence of racism. Racism, similar to melancholic, thus becomes an issue of exclusion-yet-retention.

To elaborate her ideas, Cheng spells out that American values and canonical literature actually participate in influencing the trace and operation of racism. She provides the readers with the observations of Eric Lott, Michael Rogin, Toni Morrison, Paul Gilroy, Frantz Fanon, Julia Stern and David Palumbo Liu to expound how the alien (racial others) becomes 「a distinctive locus of exclusion for American nationality」 (13). In other words, it is this exclusion that constitutes the formations of American nationality and it is the issue about race that provokes the evolution of American democracy. Instead of being content with her discovery of the historical origin and possible social and psychical paths of racial melancholia, Cheng, by discussing Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, further explores the subjectivity of the melancholic object and its contribution to the study of the racialized subjects in the next part of the chapter.

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l  Melancholic Responses (憂鬱回應)

Although it is not an easy task to talk about the pain and sorrow of the racialized other, for the discussion might naturalize or re-provoke the grief, Cheng claims that it is necessary to pay attention to the agency in terms of racial grief. In her point of view, literature can be one of the locations of this socially and psychically complicated nexus. Through Morrison's Invisible Man, Cheng clarifies that the sense of racial invisibility, rather than being a one-way action, in effect, exists mutually between the dominant and the minority. That is to say, a person can be 「both a melancholic object and a melancholic subject, both the one lost and the one losing」 (17). Based on this concept, Cheng identifies the entangled feeling of love and hate and inferiority complex demonstrated in Morrison's The Bluest Eye so as to talk about the hidden discomfort of the racial others under the governance of the white ideal and their origin. As Cheng states, this discomfort relates not only to race, but also to gender, which might be overlooked or minimized. This observation illustrates the multiplicity within the operation of history, culture, race, gender and psychology of the racialized people in the making of American identity. Cheng asserts that only through the basic understanding of the complexity above can one continue the study of the racial minority: the Asian Americans are in particular the target of Cheng here.

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l  Morphology of Ghostliness (化為鬼魅)

l  Race and Psychoanalysis (種族與精神分析)

In the last part of the chapter, Cheng first mentions the usually antithetical attitude toward theory and politics when discussing the issue of race, and proposes that the methodology regarding race should be re-conceptualized. With names of some celebrated theorists and socio-historians and their applications on race study, Cheng not only presents psychoanalysis as a powerful and potent method in her book, but also testifies that 「the politics of race has always spoken in the language of psychology」 (28). In the other chapters of her book, Cheng endeavors to help expand a vocabulary in the study of racial melancholia and to activate the political conduct, which should not be necessarily fixed or entirely accepted.

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