This presentation comes from Shinhee Han’s and my forthcoming co-authored book on psychoanalysis and Asian immigration, A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia and Racial Dissociation (Duke). The project explores the changing history of the (racial) subject in relation to the subject of history. Because the book covers a twenty-year period, we are effectively investigating the psychic structures of immigration, assimilation, and racialization from Generation X to Generation Y.

“Psychic Nowhere” presents a case history and commentary on a parachute child from Korea. (The term “parachute children” encompasses adolescents and children as young as eight who migrate often on their own from different parts of Asia to English-speaking countries in the West for educational opportunities.) What does it mean socially—and how does it feel—to be a young person negotiating the politics of immigration on your own? To answer this question, my talk considers among other things the psychic structures of colorblindness and racial dissociation among millennials.

David L. Eng is Richard L. Fisher Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania (USA), where he is also Professor in the Program in Asian American Studies, the Program in Comparative Literature & Literary Theory, and the Program in Gender, Sexuality & Women’s Studies. Eng has held visiting professorships at the University of Bergen (Norway), King’s College London, Harvard University, and the University of Hong Kong.  He is the recipient of research fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, and the Mellon Foundation, among others.  His areas of specialization include American literature, Asian American studies, Asian diaspora, psychoanalysis, critical race theory, queer studies, gender studies, and visual culture.

Eng is author of The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy (Duke, 2010) and Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Duke, 2001).  He is co-editor with David Kazanjian of Loss: The Politics of Mourning (California, 2003) and with Alice Y. Hom of Q & A: Queer in Asian America (Temple, 1998).  In addition, he is co-editor of two special issues of the journal Social Text: with Teemu Ruskola and Shuang Shen, “China and the Human” (2011/2012), and with Jack Halberstam and José Esteban Muñoz, “What’s Queer about Queer Studies Now?” (2005).  His current book project, “Reparations and the Human,” investigates the relationship between political and psychic genealogies of reparation in Asia during the Cold War.  He has a forthcoming co-authored book with Shinhee Han, A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia and Racial Dissociation, a collection of psychoanalytic case histories and commentaries on Asian immigrants in the diaspora.

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