ABSTRACT
Racial melancholia describes both social and psychic structures of loss emerging from Asian immigrant experiences that can be worked through only with considerable pain and difficulty. Here it is important to emphasize that the immigration process is based on a structure of loss. Throughout the documentary, the authors witness in everyday acts, gestures, and offhand comments by her entire family, the active production of Borshay Liem's Korean otherness, accompanied by its simultaneous reinscription and containment, a whitewashing and effacing of this difference through what the author have been calling the racialization of intimacy. While pointing out this palpable danger, he would like to emphasize in the present analysis of transnational adoption the elimination or attenuation of this intergenerational and intersubjective process, the loss of the communal nature of racial melancholia.
