{"product_id":"the-melancholy-of-race-9780195151626","title":"The Melancholy of Race","description":"\u003cb\u003eBook Synopsis\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn this groundbreaking, interdisciplinary study Anne Anlin Cheng argues that we have to understand racial grief not only as the result of racism but also as a foundation for racial identity. The Melancholy of Race proposes that racial identification is itself already a melancholic 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. Using psychoanalytic theories on mourning and melancholia as inroads into her subject, Cheng offers a closely observed and carefully reasoned account of the minority experience as expressed in works of art by, and about, Asian-Americans and African-Americans. She argues that the racial minority and dominant American culture both suffer from racial melancholia and that this insight is crucial to a productive reimagining of progressive politics. Her discussion ranges from Flower Drum Song to M. Butterfly, Brown v. Board of Education to Anna Deavere Smith'\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTrade Review\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOne measure of a healthy and thriving literature is the health of its critics and theorists. If measured against the work of Anne Anlin Cheng, Asian-American literature is not only alive and thriving, but in the midst of a renaissance. Her discussion of race theory goes far beyond the often muddled binary discussion of racialized difference, historical chronology, or sociological case study, offering a new view of race and ethnicity in literature and psychoanalysis. * Shawn Wong, University of Washington *","brand":"Oxford University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51766880371031,"sku":"9780195151626","price":49.4,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0817\/1739\/5799\/files\/9780195151626.jpg?v=1758711512","url":"https:\/\/bookcurl.com\/products\/the-melancholy-of-race-9780195151626","provider":"Book Curl","version":"1.0","type":"link"}