ABSTRACT
Racial melancholia names and explains the psychological effects of systemic racism via whiteness that are manifested in the lives and bodies of people of color in the US. An extension of Freud’s theorizations of melancholia, racial melancholia helps readers understand the ways that socially enforced losses of cherished facets of minoritized identities—identities tied to race, ethnicity, gender, or sexuality—are felt and experienced as individuals’ failures to conform to society. As such, this concept works very well to explain the complex sets of losses experienced by the main characters in Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese. Additionally, because of the visual nature of Yang’s graphic novel and his sophisticated rendering of the psychic effects of whiteness onto Asian Americans, the novel works well as a text for instructing this key concept. Though challenging to teach, students understanding this concept will recognize the cost of “fitting in” for racially minoritized individuals like Asians in the US, and begin to see possibilities for pushing back against such processes of socially coerced losses centered on racism and other exclusions.
