THE RIFKIND CENTER FOR THE HUMANITIES AND ARTS PRESENTS

Racial Rage, Racial Guilt: The Uses of Anger in Asian America

Thursday, November 30, 5 – 6:30pm

The Rifkind Center, NAC 6/316
The City College of New York

Join us at the Rifkind Center on November 30th at 5pm for a talk by Prof. David Eng (University of Pennsylvania) on the complex lives of Asian Americans.

Asian Americans are conventionally described as “middle-man minorities,” outside of dominant racial paradigms of white and black, adjunct to white privilege and exempt from the brunt of systemic violence directed against black people. Historical accounts of the in-betweenness of Asian Americans trace their origins to how Asian coolie labor has served to triangulate white capital and African slavery over the course of European modernity. If this is the material history of in-betweenness, what is the psychic corollary of the middle-man thesis? Through an analysis of the Netflix dark comedyseries Beef, as well as case histories of Asian American patients and students, I argue that the psychic effects of occupying a racially intermediate position implicate an unexplored terrain of racial rage and racial guilt that Asian Americans are insistently socialized to hold on behalf of others.

David L. Eng is Richard L. Fisher Professor of English and Faculty Director of the Program in Asian American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, where is also Professor in the Program in Comparative Literature & Literary Theory and the Program in Gender, Sexuality & Women’s Studies. Eng is the author of several books and edited collections. His most recent monograph is Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans (co-authored with Shinhee Han, Duke UP, 2019). His current book project, Reparations and the Human (Duke UP, forthcoming), investigates the relationship between political and psychic genealogies of reparation in Cold War Asia.

FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC