Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation

“Seamlessly and effectively integrating clinical case histories with psychoanalysis, critical race theory, and the tortured history of racial integration and segregation, this book offers a compelling analysis of race as relation, whiteness as property, and the history of Asian American social exclusion in the United States.” - Hirokazu Yoshikawa, author of Immigrants Raising Citizens: Undocumented Parents and their Young Children

“David L. Eng and Shinhee Han's boldly ambitious and learned book accomplishes what few other authors have even attempted: the integration of critical racial and cultural theory with clinical psychoanalysis. Eng and Han challenge us to confront afresh the pervasive and painful consequences of the cumulative trauma bred in a racialized social order. Readers from both the clinical and academic worlds will welcome Eng and Han's stunning insights and powerful narratives.” - Jessica Benjamin, author of Beyond Doer and Done To: Recognition Theory, Intersubjectivity and the Third

“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.” - Mae Ngai, Columbia University

"Intentionally answering the call for interdisciplinary scholarship, this innovative work will be valuable for clinicians as well as scholars of race. Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals." - J. deGuzman, Choice

"One of the most striking aspects of Eng and Han’s book is the relative ease with which it toggles back and forth between psychoanalytic case studies of people in various stages of suffering and characters in novels who were created to embody themes of beauty and triumph, suffering and fracture. . . . There’s a power in being able to recognize our struggles as the result of paradoxes we live within rather than seeing them as purely private failings. It’s a step toward imagining lives that we might be the authors of, with endings that we write ourselves." - Hua Hsu, The New Yorker

"Eng and Han push conversations in important new directions through their interpersonal/structural engagement with the most practical and therapeutic aspects of trauma theory." - Anjali Vats, Quarterly Journal of Speech

"Accessibly written and powerfully argued, Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation is an excellent resource for any scholar thinking about race and psychoanalysis and, specifically, who are thinking critically about the use of psychoanalytic paradigms like mourning, loss, melancholia, infantile development, reparation, or transitional objects in relation to questions of the lived experiences of racial oppression." - Christopher Bennett, Journal of Critical Race Inquiry

"Eng and Han—a literature professor and a psychotherapist, respectively—demonstrate how to understand the entanglements of history, culture, and psychoanalysis for Asian Americans. . . . This is an unusual social justice project, for it imagines a collective politics that is grounded in the intimate—and highly individualized—work of therapeutic repair." - Amy R. Wong, Public Books

“Eng and Han’s work provides a critical vocabulary for articulating the slippery and insidious ways multicultural violence operates in the contemporary era.... Eng and Han contribute an invaluable perspective on Asian Americans’ racial and psychic processes that will be of interest to scholars across disciplines....” - Corinne Mitsuye Sugino, Journal of Asian American Studies

"Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation begins a groundbreaking conversation of looking at clinical case history—cases in which Asian American students have failed to live up to the stereotype—to depathologise the Freudian notion of melancholia and introduce a novel psychoanalytic theory called 'racial dissociation' that incorporates the Asian American student-patient experience relating to immigration, assimilation and racialisation within a discourse traditionally focused on white vis-à-vis black." - Elaine Chiew, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal